This is part two of a three-part series by Jane Clark called “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”
As any zombie apocalypse–prepper worth their salt knows, step one is to take stock of what you’ve got. To deal with any threat, you need a clear picture of available resources, personnel and weapons, and a good understanding of the enemy. As an EAB Ambassador, I needed to inform as many of my neighbours as possible about the risk to their trees and what actions they could take. But with limited time, funds and volunteer resources, I wondered how best to accomplish this.
Back in June, following my Ambassador training, I accompanied Jessica and Janet from LEAF, and the amazing Rita and her Green13 team on my first of many door-to-door canvasses. Thanks to that experience and the articles I’d written, I was getting to know my enemy well. I felt ready to take the message to the streets, so I checked my BIA’s (Business Improvement Area’s) summer events calendar and found that two major street festivals were coming up, as well as a weekly farmers’ market that invited guests for their community table. I contacted the organizers, and they offered me a place, fee-free.
I gathered brochures and flyers from LEAF and started searching for personnel to join my team. With that old “ask a busy person” adage in mind, I decided to reach out to my fellow RoncyWorks volunteer street sweepers, and sent around an e-plea for help. The first event was the Roncy Rocks street festival, where a fellow sweep agreed to help out. But I was about to learn my first volunteer-organizing lesson: never waste a volunteer’s time. When I arrived several minutes after our meet-up time, she’d already left. And she never came back.
A couple of weeks later, another RoncyWorks volunteer who had received my plea—a CBC Radio producer, no less—left me a message with questions about EAB. A few days after that, I found myself discussing the epidemic with Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway. My head was spinning—after all, he’s Toronto-famous!
But after the show, I felt I’d utterly blown it. Did I say anything useful at all? I hadn’t even mentioned LEAF! Then it got even weirder. Another call: CBC again, this time asking me to talk about EAB in the rest of the province—about which I knew almost nothing. After a week of frantic researching, I was on the air talking to Ontario Morning. Still nerve-wracking, but at least this time I managed to squeeze in more information.
Still, I was sure the only people who had tuned in were friends and fellow volunteers. Lesson two: you never know what impact your actions will have. Rita called. “A gentleman who heard you on Metro Morning tracked us down through the Green 13 site, and he’s volunteered to travel from his home north of the city to help canvass!” Then I met her friend Marg, who became the Rita of Ward 14 (by summer’s end, this unstoppable canvassing machine would visit well over a thousand households).
Now, with a couple of neighbourhood events under my belt, it was early July and we had only eight weeks until the end of treatment season. I started scheduling canvassing across Ward 14 and LEAF helped spread the word. But together with Marg and the gentleman from the north, I had a grand total of three volunteers. Clearly if we were going to save the trees in the ‘hood, we needed to drum up more boots on the ground.
I turned to Michelle at LEAF for advice. She said they could provide an information session if I arranged it and could get at least 15 people signed up. She recommended I contact my city councillor, Gord Perks, to put the word out and help secure a venue free of charge.
We had a decent turn-out for the July 30th presentation, but only a few of the attendees signed up to volunteer. And of those, none actually showed later when it came time to canvass. Lesson number three: I should have followed up with everyone immediately.
Now it was August. I sat down with my two stalwarts to face facts. Most people we met were receptive, but we weren’t finding many ash trees. Were we wasting our time? I started to panic. I called Michelle and she was able to talk me off the ledge.
She explained that even if we didn’t track down as many ash trees as I had hoped, the canvassing had other benefits, including community-building. And in our neighbourhood, with its geriatric tree population, getting the message out about tree planting was just as important as saving ash trees.
We kept slogging, but I knew I needed to find more ways to reach the homeowners who might be willing to treat their trees. I was about to learn lesson four, the most important one yet. (To be continued...)
This post is Part Two of a series by Jane A. Clark, a volunteer and freelance writer based in Toronto’s west end. Watch our blog in the coming weeks for Part Three. If you would like to help us spread the word about EAB in your community, sign up to become an Ambassador today! The EAB Ambassador Program is supported by Ontario Power Generation's Biodiversity Program, Live Green, a project of the City of Toronto, York Region and Ontario Trillium Foundation.