For 30 years, Lucio Abbruzzese has been walking around downtown Toronto handing out sandwiches to homeless people, and helping others do the same. The 57-year-old religion teacher in Toronto’s Catholic school board represents both the past and likely future of a weakened and stumbling volunteer sector in Canadian society.
Canada’s volunteers are getting older and fewer, and often find themselves carrying on alone without much support, says Megan Conway, CEO of Volunteer Canada, a national charity that advances volunteerism in Canada. As Canadians become more detached from religious institutions, they are also drifting away from one of the major engines for all kinds of volunteering.
Abbruzzese’s dogged, determined dedication to help the homeless is deeply tied to an experience of spiritual conversion he had as a young man. As a lonely and deeply unhappy tech worker, a 27-year-old Abbruzzese encountered a dying man on the street.
“It changed my life,” said Abbruzzese, who went on to found Street Patrol, a weekly volunteer program to feed the poor and homeless that is run out of St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Toronto.
While the experience also put the young Abbruzzese on the path to actively engaging with his Catholic faith, there is little about his volunteer work that is explicitly religious. He recoils from the idea of proselytizing among desperate people who need food, warm socks and quiet conversation. He is there for them, he says — not as a brand ambassador for his own church.
Nor are he and his team of volunteers doing something that some level of government can or should do, he says.
“We’re not solving homelessness,” he said before setting out on the second-last Street Patrol of the summer.
“But we’re making a connection with another human being who is really having a hard time. If they can just feel connected, you never know where those ripples will go. That’s what I really believe.”
Street Patrol is supported by St. Patrick’s Church, but most of the volunteers come from elsewhere. They are mostly Catholics, but not necessarily church-going. Like Abbruzzese, the regular volunteers are older, often retirees. From time to time, parish youth groups will help out too — although that has become a rare event.
It was late August this year before Street Patrol welcomed its first youth group for the two-to-three-hour walk through downtown areas where homeless people often congregate: Nathan Phillips Square near Toronto’s City Hall, Sankofa (formerly Dundas) Square, and the front yard of Metropolitan United Church, at the intersection of Church and Queen streets.
In Street Patrol’s early years, the Archdiocese of Toronto encouraged youth groups at many of its 225 parishes to make sandwiches and spend an evening handing them out. Today, there are fewer parish youth groups and the Office of Catholic Youth is doing little to encourage them, Abbruzzese says.
This mirrors what’s happening nationally, says Conway, of Volunteer Canada. Canada has not had a national volunteering strategy since 1967. The infrastructure that helps to organize volunteers — by training them, equipping them, and telling them where to go — is falling apart. The result is a “smaller cohort of older adults” who volunteer, said Conway — with many of them heading for burnout.
‘Everything is tied to culture’
If Canada loses its volunteers, the country will soon be faced with some important questions, Conway says. “What does it mean to be a citizen of this country?” she asked.
Chad Lubelsky, a board member at Volunteer Canada and executive director of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El Beth Sholom synagogue, says it is hard to imagine a Canada without volunteers.
“I know that 58 per cent of non-profits in Canada rely on volunteers to fully deliver their mission,” he said.
“I would worry about our capacity as a society to deliver core social services. I would worry about the most marginalized and most excluded going even more to the fringes, having fewer and fewer supports. I would worry about a precipitous drop in empathy and understanding.”
Empathy and understanding is what Abbruzzese hopes young people develop from volunteering with Street Patrol on their summer evenings. But he sees teenagers stuck in a culture that stands in the way.
“Everything is tied to culture. So, the way culture goes, volunteering will go as well,” he said.
“Because I teach high school, I have a better idea [of] what’s going through that culture. It’s a very insular culture — stay at home, obviously online culture. It’s not in the physical world. COVID made it 100 times worse.”
The latest Statistics Canada data available shows an eight per cent overall drop in the volunteering rate between 2018 and 2023. Conway says it is tempting to attribute this drop to COVID, but she is not convinced. There is a longer-term trend and the factors driving it run deep, she says.
While informal volunteering — shovelling a neighbour’s walk, helping a stranger with directions — decreased eight per cent between 2018 and 2023, institutions that rely on formal volunteers are suffering more. Over this period, volunteer hours at hospitals are down 47 per cent; at sports and recreation organizations, down 34 per cent; at education and research institutions, down 30 per cent; and religious organizations, down 23 per cent.
Statistics Canada data show that just 37 per cent of Canadians participated regularly in religious activities in 2023, down from 45 per cent in 2018.
“We know that people who participate in religious life volunteer more, are more empathetic, are more likely to give more money to charity, participate more actively in civic life,” Lubelsky said. “If religious institutions play less and less of a role in society … I don’t know what we have to step into that place to replace it.”
“As a non-religious person working for a religious institution, one of the things I’m learning and seeing is the key role that a religious institution can play in supporting its members to connect themselves to something bigger than themselves — be that in a religious sense or a non-religious sense.”
Jean-Pierre Fernandes, a 26-year-old who participates in Toronto’s Street Patrol, says he welcomes the opportunity to escape the insularity and self-involvement of online culture.
“There’s something about being engaged with people we’re not typically engaged with,” he said as he hauled a cooler full of sandwiches through the streets. “They’re not so different.”
His friend, 24-year-old Michael Bertolini, was primed for his experience with Street Patrol by the part-time job he had as a student studying criminology at Ontario Tech University. He worked with homeless people at the Back Door Mission in Oshawa.
“People need help,” he said.
After living on Toronto’s streets for 10 years, Michael Onaran says he has come to rely on the Street Patrol volunteers.
“When they come, I like it,” he said. “They give me something to eat.”
Being a member of our church and Lions Inernational here in our small town,we too face the declining numbers of volunteers. Its seems to be a uphill push to enrol new younger members with the “hill getting steeper” as I get older. The youth really are to busy. And even their parents are busy with sports,schooling and social events for their kids.
Our little,growing town operates mostly from volunteers,weather its from groups from local churches,Rotary clubs,Kinsmen,Lions and even our Chamber of Commerce helps out,it is what makes our town so attractive to so many that live here. But keeping the numbers up is and always will be a challenge. Many have retired form these groups due to burnout and I too feel at times that the work load is now turning into a job. I volunteered to serve my community and to have fun doing it. The fun part seems to be less and less. I know all the rest of the volunteers feel the same why and thats why I stick around and raise my hand when needed.
We Lions at a district level have been looking for that “perfect APP” to help get younger blood in our ranks. Haven’t found it yet,but we will continue to appoach ,ask and drag them in,one new member at a time. I will not allow my club to parish on my watch. Good luck to you all,and God Bless the Volunteer. God Bless Canada and God Bless You.