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Snow is falling, decorations are going up, people are shopping, and the sounds of classic Christmas music are filling our ears.
It really is a time for giving and caring.
But while most of us throw on a big coat, warm socks and shoes, eat a hot meal and get to come back home to sleep in a nice bed each night, others around town aren’t as fortunate. Others make due with a small tattered coat, or old damp socks and thin shoes, or eat what they can, or struggle to find a place to sleep at night, be it outside, on a couch, or wherever they can.
Volunteers in our community, like Dennis Chippa, have been working to make a difference for many, many years, seeing just how great a struggle people in North Bay live through.
“I think it was a gradual thing,” Dennis said about his journey into volunteerism. “Even as a kid I was involved in a lot of organizations and most involved helping people.”
But it was ‘thirty-something-years-ago’ when he moved to North Bay to start his career that he realized he could make a bigger difference. This career was in television media.
“When my dad and I had the conversation that I’d be on TV, he said there was a real opportunity for me,” Dennis recalled. “There is an element of power attached to being a media person, especially in a smaller community. My dad said there were two ways I could use it: for my own purposes or to help others. He said never forget what you’ve got especially in media, what you have is a skill and if you use it to help other people it becomes a gift and that has always stuck with me.”
A couple years after he started in media, he was contacted to be a coach for the Special Olympics, due to how so many participants looked up to him due to his on-screen personality.
“When I started to do some work with them it went on for ten years,” Dennis said. “It was a great deal of fun and that led into Community Living and I thought to myself ‘why not keep doing this.’
But it was after he was approached to do a fundraising campaign in town, the first being Alarmed For Life, that he realized on a deeper level the difference between economic classes in the community.
“The campaign was about providing smoke alarms for people who couldn’t afford them,” he said. “I think that was my first real exposure to kind of take a look and say ‘what do mean people can’t afford a smoke alarm, they are really cheap!’ That was my first exposure to a community that was on hard times. That was when I got to start to know the marginalized community in North Bay.”
After that, Dennis would continue to work with the community, spending eleven years on the AIDS Committee, helping in the Warming Centre, and now the Gathering Place, as its executive director.
“It’s important to remember we’re all just a few cheques away from needing help,” he said, thinking about some of the people who come through the Gathering Place, looking for a good meal. “Some of these individuals through no fault of their own didn’t get the breaks I got. I can’t rewrite their history but I can at least help some of them today.”
And while numbers of people needing help continue to grow—with 162 people coming for lunch the day Dennis shared his story—it can be challenging to continue pushing forward.
“I think in some ways I get frustrated a lot more than I used to because I’ve started to care a lot more for them as a group,” Dennis said. “I think one of the things is as you get to know these folks as individuals and you get to know how interesting many of them are as individuals. That’s when I started to realize in a way I recognize I got a lot of breaks in my life and one of the more fundamental breaks in life is I grew up in a family where we learned to read and write. A lot of these folks are incredible wonderful interesting people that I meet here but they just needed a break and I think that’s where I become frustrated is finding out how we give them a break, and what break they need. It makes me more motivated to ask what more can I do to help them out.”
And so he sets out to educate the next generation in the community as often as he can, talking to students in high school or college and university about the issues in our own backyard.
“If the community understands the individuals who feel marginalized and what we’re doing to help them it really lets them understand some of the hardships they go through on a day to day basis,” Dennis said. “I’ve done a lot of presentations around the community and I think it’s crucial. Younger people are our next generation which is why we take placements from high school so they can be exposed to people in the community they probably don’t know about and so they can understand these aren’t numbers, these are individuals, and these are human beings. Each of them has their own goals, their own dreams and if we’re respectful of these individuals it makes it easier for us to help them.”
He said for many students it’s their first time being exposed to this side of the community and it’s really educating them. But it doesn’t’ scare or dissuade them, he said. More often than not, it motivates the students to want to help more.
He said there is a certain joy in helping people at the Gathering Place, watching those who needed a good meal with a smile as they sit down and relax for a few moments in their day. But in volunteering in other areas in the community, once the sun sets and cold takes hold of the streets, it can be scary, not for the safety of the volunteers, but for the lives of the people in need of help.
“The second or third night in the first year we had the Warming Centre,” Dennis explained, “we had a gentleman come in through the door and we were helping him to a cot. He stumbled in and made the natural assumption that there was alcohol involved, but when we started to talk with him, we realized his real problem was hypothermia. We were shocked to hear he didn’t know we were open or there was such thing as a warming centre, he just happened in, no mitts, just running shoes and his coast was okay, but not for one of those -40 degrees nights. We sat there and looked at each other thinking ‘we just saved that man’s life.’ That’s life changing when you realize that and it’s scary to think if we weren’t open what would have happened to this guy, he just saw the light can came in. “
Last year, in 2016, Dennis was recognized for the work he’s done over the years within the community, earning the Order of Ontario—recognition he is proud of and honoured to receive, but stresses the work all the other volunteers have done and continue to do in the community.
“I’m not anything special,” he said. “Which means anyone can do this and that’s the thing I tell people. Everyone can and should help. I did it because there was a need and I worked that need. Maybe the Gathering Place or the Warming Centre aren’t your things, but there are so many organizations in the community that need volunteers. It could be anything, really. If hockey or arts are your things, find a way and volunteer.”
But for Dennis and his need to help, it comes down to looking back and being satisfied with the work he’s put in.
“We all know where we’re going—how we all end up in the end—and I want to know at the end of the day, when I go, whenever that is, that it’s not a life wasted; that it’s a life well lived. I grew up with treating others well and it’s so far a well lived life.”
