Living Smarter By Volunteering

By Peter Sale | Published September 6, 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about living smarter these days – living smarter now so we will be able to live better in the future. This means dealing with climate change, looking after our environment in a more integrated, effective way, and working in many other ways to make our community stronger and more resilient.

Sometimes, confronted with all the problems – housing affordability, spiralling costs, stagnant pay, and, yes, climate change – people throw up their hands. The problems are far too big and too numerous for me to solve! And yet, if everyone does the little bit they can, big problems can be solved. In Muskoka, we pride ourselves on being able to do more with less, and one way that happens is through our volunteerism – we have volunteers everywhere and our community is richer for that.

Why volunteers? Why has Muskoka not created businesses or government programs to do the  needed work? Are we just too cheap? Or is the volunteer work not really needed? Are volunteers just getting in the way?

I’m not qualified to measure the value of our hospital, food bank and other social service volunteers, so will focus on environmental ones. But social service volunteering is undoubtedly hugely significant too.

Environmental volunteers are everywhere, working at all sorts of tasks. Whether working with Muskoka Lakes Association’s large water quality initiative (WQI), the provincial Lake Partners Program, Muskoka Watershed Council’s algae monitoring program, or in countless smaller efforts, lake association volunteers are out on their lakes throughout the summer-fall season making measurements of temperature and transparency, collecting water samples, performing technical analyses, and reporting the data to central locations where experts use the data to provide scientifically accurate reports on the status of our lakes. Think of the cost in time and boat use.

I know District of Muskoka staff conduct extensive water testing every summer. And the Dorset Environmental Science Centre (a severely underfunded Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks facility) carries out detailed analyses of a tiny number of our lakes every year. But without the volunteer effort we would have far less information about the state of our lakes than we do. Those data are vital for MWC’s Watershed Report Cards, produced every 5 years, and the only regularly scheduled check-up on the health of our environment. Apart from the monitoring, our Report Cards would cost $200,000 each ($40,000 per year) if not prepared largely by volunteers.

Volunteers with MWC also provide informative talks, conferences, social media posts and written documents on environmental topics, informing our wider community and municipal councils about challenges, solutions and best practices. Volunteers from Friends of the Muskoka Watershed directly support research addressing lack of calcium and excess salt. Muskoka Conservancy, Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve, Muskoka Discovery Centre, Georgian Bay Forever, Friends of Algonquin Park, Climate Action Muskoka, all the lake associations and many more environmental bodies are either partly or wholly volunteer-driven and they all welcome new volunteers. All the time, because even volunteers eventually retire.

Environmental volunteers need not be environmental scientists, or conservationists. All these organizations have tasks that need doing that can use the skills you might bring along. MWC needs people skilled in event planning, fund-raising, financial management, writing, public speaking, social media, and being helpful to community members who phone in or email with questions. Scientists are welcome too, but MWC needs way more than scientists. Other organizations are similar.

Perhaps more important, and beyond the direct benefits of the work done, our community benefits from the engagement of its members as volunteers working in many different ways to make the community better. It may sound trite, but a healthy level of volunteerism gives our community a soul. Living smarter, indeed.

And what do volunteers get out of volunteering? When you get to use your skills to better your community, you get a little bit of soul too. Plus a lot of sheer fun. Interested? Talk to us.

This article is No 13 in Muskoka Watershed Council’s current series, Living Smarter in Muskoka. Author of the article and editor of the series is Dr Peter Sale, marine ecologist, retired academic, Muskoka resident for the past 19 years, and Director and former Chair of MWC.

First published on MuskokaRegion.com