2022 Volunteer Award Winners
Congratulations Vince!
2022 NBTC Lifetime Achievement Award
We are nominating Vince Zvonar for the NBTC Lifetime Volunteer award. Vince has been a major contributor to the success of the Niagara Bruce Trail Club and has been volunteering in many ways over the last 17 years.
He has served in many roles for the club. He currently serves on the board as Land Stewardship Director and was formerly Trail Development and Maintenance Director for 4 years. In addition to serving on the board, Vince is a long-time hike leader. He led both the Tuesday and Thursday hikes for several years and currently leads many of the weekend hikes.
As Land Steward Director, Vince has the responsibility to appoint and train individuals to look after the BTC property in Niagara. Inspections and handling any issues that might arise with the adjacent landowners are part of Vince’s duties. He fulfills these tasks with diplomacy and ease.
Vince contributes to the Annual General meeting by being part of the set up and take down crew. He has also barbecued burgers for the lunch following the meeting. He has purchased and roasted the pig for several fundraisers for the club. Vince has always been generous with his time and talent when it comes to training new trail workers and mentoring new Trail Directors.
Vince is terrific at designing, planning and the construction of structures while being efficient with materials and expenditures. The replacement of the stairs at Balls Falls is one of the more significant changes to the trails in Niagara that Vince as well as the club are very proud of. Vince was responsible for the new Bridges at Rockway, Louth, and the bridge near the Jim Rainforth side trail. The bridge materials were cut, drilled, preassembled and marked in his driveway for assembly and installation at the site.
When Vince isn’t contributing to the club by performing all of these tasks, he can be found out on the trail, clearing new and existing trails as well as removing fallen trees. Vince has been one of the main sawyers for Niagara the past 17 years always working at keeping our trails free from fallen trees. In 2018, Vince was awarded the Susan Oleskevich award by the BTC for outstanding trail work and commitment to trail maintenance.
Most recently, Vince helped out with the pull parties to remove invasive species and planted trees that were donated to the club. We have probably forgotten many of the other ways that Vince has served the club. These are just a sample of the many things that Vince has done for the club over the years and why we feel he deserves to be given the NBTC Lifetime Volunteer award.
Submitted by Debbie Demizio, Janet Davey & Rick Waters
2022 NBTC Volunteer of the Year Award
What a challenging year to organize and schedule hikes for all of the avid Niagara Bruce Trail hikers. Covid has required scheduling, changing, cancelling and rescheduling hikes. For this reason we nominate Alan Laver for Volunteer of the Year.
As NBTC’s official Hike Coordinator, Alan went beyond the call of duty to make sure everyone that wanted to hike could hike throughout the year. One of the many challenges he had to endure was setting up the schedule for what was the norm in the past and then changing everything to online registration. The number of hikers for all hikes was lowered and that, of course, required more hike leaders. Alan worked tirelessly to find more leaders by taking on his first Hike Leader Training. With this extra effort he added 10 new hike leaders. It was obviously important to him that no hiker was left without the opportunity to hike. It was not unusual that hikes would often end up with 12 hikers rather than 10. Alan’s attitude was, ‘no problem, we’ll head off in two separate hikes, 15 minutes apart’. (Lucky for us there always seemed to be an extra leader amongst the group). He made sure all hikers felt welcomed, encouraged and embraced by NBTC!
The number of emails and text that Alan had to answer to keep everyone on track would have had most of us throwing in the towel. Not Alan! He understood that hiking was what we all needed and he worked tirelessly to make sure we could do just that.
Even though the trail remained opened all organized hikes were cancelled for a while, and hikes were limited to 5 hikers, Alan encouraged everyone to make their own small groups and to continue hiking.
Being the Hike Coordinator was almost a full-time job this year. But in addition to this, Alan also found the time to maintain a section of the trail from Quarry Road to Cherry Avenue, assist in larger trail maintenance work parties, be a member of the Badge Committee, lead night hikes and many, many day hikes as well! Alan also connected with a landowner to secure a meeting place for our board. Talk about going above and beyond!
Through all of the challenges Alan faced, throughout the year, he was able to do it with a sense of humour and kindness.
For all these reasons we believe Alan is a worthy recipient as Volunteer of the Year.
Sincerely,
Roberta Blackie and Lauren Doig
Congratulations Alan!
Congratulations Jacques!
2022 NBTC Unsung Hero Award
Urban Dictionary Definition for “Unsung Hero”: Someone who does a great job yet receives little or no recognition for that. An unsung Hero usually refrains from claiming too much in return for his/her efforts.
This definition fits Jacques Boilard perfectly as he quietly goes about helping NBTC maintain a first-class Hiking Trail. Jacques is always ready to offer help without being asked and is ready to jump in when he sees a need.
Jacques is a Trail Captain for the section between Sanatorium Rd and DeCew House. When walking through this section you can see through his workmanship the pride he takes in maintaining his section of the trail. Jacques has taken on the task as the “go to” Grass Trimmer for the NBTC. He is out trimming sections of the trail where the Trail Captains are unable to do it.
When not hiking or leading hikes or working to maintain the trail, Jacques is busy at home painstakingly painting blazes on repurposed fence boards. Jacques re-purposed his neighbour's wooden fence that was being torn down. He cut the wood to the specified size and painted these boards and are now used for marking the NBTC trails. January 2021 a generous donor gave us wood left over from Deck Construction and Jacques cut and painted another 295 blaze boards. He has also collected containers for paint for the small army of volunteers who maintain the trails.
In the winter of 2020, the Niagara Bruce Trail Club hike schedule offered a new series of 5-6 hikes led by Jacques, to earn the NEW! coveted winter end to end badge. Jacques was clearly overwhelmed by the response to this hike. Over 70 enthusiastic hikers showed up the first day. Not only did Jacques lead all the scheduled hikes in this series, he led several makeup hikes so that as many participants as possible could earn the coveted new badge. I believe he ended up hiking the Niagara section 3 times over the course of the winter. Jacques is also involved with Hiking 101 helping new hikers understand the fundamentals of hiking and he shares his experiences with the new hikers encouraging them to continue hiking.
Jacques is a deserving recipient of this award, often working behind the scenes to make the club run smoothly, always with a smile and helpful hand.
Submitted by Debbie Demizio & Rick Waters