Celebrating Volunteerism in Lethbridge

The Challenge

Lethbridge has one of the highest volunteer participation rates in the country. Fifty-seven percent of residents volunteer. Over sixty thousand people. Five million hours a year.

But none of it shows up in economic reports. Unpaid work is invisible work. And invisible work is hard to fund.

Volunteer Lethbridge needed to change that. They needed to translate the soft power of community service into hard numbers that could justify continued investment from the City and the Province. They needed to make the invisible visible.

The Solution

We produced an advocacy video called “Celebrating Volunteerism in Lethbridge.”

The video features Executive Director Amanda Jensen speaking directly to camera, intercut with documentary footage of volunteers across the city. The goal was to build a rhetorical arc that moved from personal to collective, from emotional to economic.

Jensen opens by reframing what volunteerism is. Not duty. Not sacrifice. Passion.

“What’s your passion? What makes you feel that burn to really change it? You gotta find that passion for yourself and then try to have fun with it.”

Then she pivots to connection.

“There’s so many like-minded people you’ll find when you work with these organisations that it just ends up being like another hangout day.”

And finally, she makes the existential case.

“I cannot imagine this community without volunteers. And I’m not sure I would want to live in a community without volunteers.”

That emotional foundation set the stage for the number.

$135 million.

Sixty thousand volunteers. Ninety-one hours average per person. Valued at approximately $24 per hour, which is the cost to replace that labour with paid staff. That’s the annual economic impact of volunteerism in Lethbridge.

The number transformed the conversation. It gave councillors something to cite in budget discussions. It reframed volunteer support from charity to infrastructure investment.

Visually, we designed the video to mirror the arc of the script. Ground-level footage of volunteers in action captures the personal scale. Soup kitchens. Sports coaching. Youth mentorship. Museum docents. The intimate, handheld work shows the human reality.

Then we pull up. Aerial shots of the city, the coulees, the neighbourhoods. The drone footage shows the community scale. It visualises the aggregate. Sixty thousand people, spread across every corner of the city, doing work that holds the whole thing together.

The camera movement mirrors the argument. Start close. End wide. Personal passion becomes collective infrastructure.

The production challenge was coverage. Volunteer Lethbridge supports seventy-four member agencies. We couldn’t film them all, but we needed the B-roll to represent the breadth. We pulled from multiple shoots and worked with partner footage to build a visual tapestry that showed just how many different forms volunteerism takes.

The Result

The video premiered at a flag-raising ceremony at City Hall during National Volunteer Week 2024.

Councillor John Middleton-Hope spoke after the screening. He cited the $135 million figure and pointed out that major events, the Brier, the PGA tournament, wouldn’t have happened without volunteers.

That was the moment we knew it had worked. The number had landed. The council was using it.

Volunteer Lethbridge secured continued funding through the City’s FCSS program, including a $131,000 Enhanced Capacity Advancement grant. The video was used in grant applications and policy presentations throughout the year.

But the real result was the shift in language.

For years, the sector had struggled to articulate its value in terms that policymakers understood. This campaign gave them the vocabulary. Passion and purpose for the public. Numbers and ROI for the council chamber.

The video made the invisible visible. And visible work gets funded.

That’s what this project taught us.

The most effective advocacy isn’t purely emotional or purely rational. It’s both. You need the story to make people care. You need the data to make them act. The best campaigns find the place where those two things meet.

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