City of Warman finds creative method to honour volunteers

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Warman was still able to recognize the volunteers in the community, just not in a formal setting.

The Warman Volunteer Awards ceremony was scheduled for April but, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, that couldn’t happen. Instead, recipients were presented with their respective awards at their homes on June 4.

The City of Warman decided now was the best time to recognize it’s volunteers.

“We didn’t want to wait until all of this passed because we don’t know how long we’re going to be in this COVID-19 bubble,” Mayor Sheryl Spence explained. “So we needed to be creative and going to their homes and showing at least some appreciation; for now was probably the next best thing that we could do.”

The nominees for each respective award were announced in March, however, the award recipients weren’t notified until recently.

“A couple weeks ago the committee met and we went over some different ideas of how we can recognize them,” said city clerk and organizer of the event, Dawn Johnson. “Should we put it off until fall, until there was an event? But there are too many unknowns to do that, so we figured let’s recognize (the recipients) right now.”

Johnson believes that it’s important that the 2020 award winners were recognized because it’s their day in the spotlight, after giving up their own time to serve the community.

“They’re usually the people in the background, so they’re not really front and centre a lot of the times,” she said.

During each respective presentation, Mayor Spence told each recipient that once the public is allowed to gather again, they will have a proper celebration to honour them.

“It’s really important because there would be so many things that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t have volunteers,” Spence added.

According to Johnson, they might “piggy-back” on another city event and will recognize the winners publicly in front of their peers.

New this year is the Legacy Recognition, which is a commitee-selected award to honour someone posthumously and who meant so much to the community.

That honour went to longtime Warman resident Catharine Braun, who passed away July 12, 2019. The award was presented in her memory to remember the dedication and the countless hours of her own time she gave up in making Warman a better place to live.

That plaque will now go on a bench located at the Warman Cemetery where Braun put in a lot of effort in the up-keep of the site.

Johnson added that the awards wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions made by sponsors of the event.

She said many of the sponsors could have easily chose to not have been involved with this year’s awards celebration, but that wasn’t the case.

“They could have said, ‘you know what? We’ll wait until next year’.
“But, they said ‘no, these volunteers need to be recognized’.”