By Sheldon Spackman

United Way honours Riley-Sloan with Distinguished Volunteer Award

Jul 5, 2018 | 8:45 AM

A woman described as a tireless Client Ambassador for United Way Central Alberta has been honoured with the organization’s annual Distinguished Volunteer Award.

Together with her St. Bernard service dog Benjamin, Carla Riley-Sloan helps possible donors understand the impact their donations have on the people and families supported by United Way.

“I was involved in a very serious car accident 14 years ago now,” recalls Riley-Sloan. “I lost vision in my right eye, I’ve ha d a brain injury and I’ve also had damage done to my lungs, so I have breathing difficulties. When I first got involved with United Way, I was using an organization called Catholic Social Supports, the Brain Injury Clinic.”

“They helped me to relearn how to go about daily life, learn how to have a normal life with my limitations,” she explains. “I was having memory issues, I’d get up in the morning and you know we all go to the bathroom and we brush our hair and brush our teeth and things like that. I couldn’t remember how to do them. The simplest things we all take for granted, I could no longer remember I had to do.”  

Riley-Sloan says she reminds potential donors that United Way is very much a community-based organization where local funds raised always stay in the community.

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“There’s so many different organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters, the CNIB, different organizations like that that would not be able to help as many people as they do if it wasn’t for United Way and the funding that they receive from United Way,” she exclaims. “There’s so many different organizations in our community that wouldn’t exist without United Way and all these organizations benefit us as a community.”

Riley-Sloan says being acknowledged for her efforts is simply beyond words.

“I volunteer because I want to give back,” she states. “I’ve been helped, I’d like to try and help back but to be recognized, it made my day to be honest with you. I’ve never been recognized for the volunteer work I do like that, I was tickled pink.”

 Brett Speight, CEO of United Way Central Alberta says it’s important to give out the award each year because they rely so heavily on the kindness of their volunteers.

“We have our campaign volunteers that help drive the fundraising and we also have our community impact council which helps make the really tough decisions of where the funds that we’ve raised during campaign time are invested, what agencies receive funding,” he explains. “We also have our Client Ambassadors and what they do is go out with us and speak to different groups and work places as we go through our campaign and they share their story of how they’ve been helped by an agency that receives funding through United Way.”

“Staff and I sat down to discuss the winner this year and Carla’s name kept coming up,” says Speight. “She is so dedicated to helping us tell her story and show the donors where their funds go and the impact it has and whenever we ask, she’s always there to say ‘yes’ and participate and speak to work place events or other events for us and has been doing so for almost 10 years now.”