Volunteers give much to Heritage Victoria
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This article was published 23/04/2019 (2329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Heritage Victoria Community Centre is a place for young and old to gather in St. James. The community centre has been operating at the same site at 950 Sturgeon Rd. for more than 40 years, but the current facility was built in the late 1980s to replace the original club that was showing its age.
Board president Sharon Groomeridge said Heritage Victoria plays an important role in the neighbourhood.
“It does allow the kids that don’t have anywhere else to be, to come and hang out in a safe place,” she said.
The community centre has two outdoor rinks and offers jackrabbits and minor hockey, ringette, soccer, softball and baseball — its traditional team name is the Hawks.
Popular year-round programming includes infant, pre-school and youth drop-ins, zumba, Elderobics and dog obedience training. The club runs a carnival each spring as well as a haunted house and breakfast with Santa event.
With an operating grant from the City of Winnipeg that “never seems to be enough” Heritage Victoria relies on income from socials and hall rentals to support the facility. The hall can hold 340 people and, according to Groomeridge, it’s often booked solid for events.
Finding and retaining volunteers is an issue at Heritage Victoria. The board of directors has eight members and is actively looking to fill several vacant positions. Groomeridge, who has been with the club for more than a decade, said it used to be easier to recruit volunteers before the days of online registration.
“The advent of the internet and online registrations for sports have certainly cut down on the people we see. When people are standing in front of you and you ask them to coach, oftentimes you can cajole them into it, when you never see them it’s hard to get them to commit,” she said, adding that the club’s small catchment size also limits the volunteer pool.
That said, the people that do give their time to Heritage Victoria make the community centre what it is.
“The people that do volunteer give a lot of their time and their energy for the club,” Groomeridge said.