By Sheldon Spackman and Troy Gillard

2019 Canada Winter Games Volunteer Centre moves to Bower Place

Oct 26, 2018 | 3:36 PM

A new Volunteer Centre for the 2019 Canada Winter Games is now up and running in the former Sears location at Bower Place.

It’s a move just down the street as the previous Volunteer Centre was located at the Ing & McKee Insurance office on Bremner Avenue for the past six months.

Lyn Radford, Chair for the 2019 Canada Winter Games in Red Deer, says Ing & McKee Insurance deserves a big ‘Thank You’ for the help they provided.

“Ing & McKee were phenominal,” states Radford. “We really appreciated them helping us through this transition period. We were outgrowing The Games office and we needed a separate facility and Ing & McKee came to bat here and knocked it out for us. Now we’ll get out of their hair so they can go back to normal operations and we’ll move over to Bower Place.”

Radford says the move to a larger space will bring two key benefits.

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“First of all, we wanted to give some visibility and ease of access,” explains Radford. “But when you start dropping in 5,500 volunteer uniforms, you’ve got to find a place to store all that and distribute it, so it will function as both a distribution centre and volunteer centre. It makes it easier, volunteers can come in if they haven’t registered yet and needing some help to register, they can just go right down to the Volunteer Centre, register and just go through the process.”

In addition, Radford says 2019 Canada Winter Games merchandise will be featured at the new ‘Great Indoors Market’, also at Bower Place.

“We will include the flagship merchandise store right there along with the Volunteer Centre after Christmas,” says Radford. “It just gives us the room to expand. Volunteers are important, so we want to make sure that they have a place that they recognize easily that they can go to and have ease of parking.”

In terms of volunteer recruitment, Radford says about 3,700 have come forward so far, with the goal being 5,500 registered volunteers.

“On November 3, we’re pretty excited, we’re going to be having an open house for volunteers at the new facility,” she reveals. “I’m encouraging new and old to come out, but especially the ones that have registered, come on out but bring a friend and sign up. We’re getting two and three hundred a week now, whereas before that was a 20-a-week.”

Following the volunteer open house, Radford says a ‘100 Days Out’ event will take place November 7 and a ‘90-Days Out’ event soon afterwards.

The Volunteer Centre Open House on Sat. Nov. 3 goes from 12-4 p.m. The centre is open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 2-6 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m.