On a cool rainy morning, Rob Steele is lending a hand in the warm kitchen of The Bakery on Wharf Avenue.
It’s not usually where he would be, but Steele is one of the 22 volunteers who joined a unique short-term solution that helped combat the staffing shortage in Sechelt restaurants this summer.
In early August, a group of mostly retired seniors decided to pitch in to help local food establishments who could not hire workers to fill their staffing needs, and not for a lack of trying. In exchange for the volunteers’ time, the businesses were asked to donate approximately $10-12 per hour to the food bank or a charity.
Now, several weeks and more than $3,500 raised later, the volunteers are serving their last few shifts.
Coasters Helping Coasters was always supposed to be a temporary measure, co-founding member Joe Sawer told Coast Reporter, and he expects it to wrap up by the end of September or the following week.
“All we’re doing is buying time for the owners and managers to find full-time staff,” Sawer said earlier in the month. “We certainly wouldn’t be asked to take hours if they could find full-time professionals, that’s for sure.”
The owner of The Bakery, Victoria Goodier, said it’s been an especially busy summer, when many Canadians travelled to the Sunshine Coast. There were odd tasks around the cafe that her employees couldn’t get to throughout the day. At first thinking “What was the catch?”, Goodier decided to try the volunteers.
“It took the stress off the staff, and it also provided a whole different energy, because many of these volunteers were seniors and most of my staff are on the younger end of the spectrum,” Goodier said.
Usually, The Bakery helps support the food bank where it can, Goodier said, so to donate for the volunteers’ time “just seemed like a really nice fit.” Now, business is slowing down as the tourism season comes to an end, and Goodier made a recent hire.
At The Bakery, as Steele was waiting to pull granola out of the oven, he said he’d be happy to help out again next summer, but would prefer that the housing crisis – one of the root causes of the Coast’s staff shortage – be addressed instead.
At its height, Coasters Helping Coasters helped out seven restaurants. They also inspired a group to start a similar initiative in Ontario, who reached out to learn how it was being done. By Sept. 24, there were only two restaurants in Sechelt still benefiting from the program. The rest, Sawer said, were able to hire the staff they needed, and no longer required the volunteers.
Another such restaurant was Savour, a new business on Wharf Avenue that benefited from the volunteers’ help for multiple days over four weeks.
The four co-owners planned to open the brunch spot in April, but struggled to find staff and had no response to posting jobs online. When they opened in the second week of July, it was with the help of Coasters Helping Coasters.
“It made us able to remain creative with our business, because we were able to fulfill the demand during that time,” Shawn Lee, one of the co-owners of Savour, said. “Because our other option was just to pare the menu way back. There was a lot of stuff that we wanted to showcase and having the extra hands to help us do that made it possible.”
Savour’s donations came to around $1,000, which they asked to direct to Sunshine Coast Community Services, where a private donor offered to match donations made to the society through September. Since Lee moved to the Coast a year and a half ago, he said his family has experienced an outpouring of community support, particularly when his young son needed leg braces, and the Lions Club donated the funding to help.
Along with prepping ingredients to make fresh in-house meals, the team of volunteers also took Savour’s owners under their wings and welcomed the four newcomers to the Sunshine Coast.
“A few of the people have been super involved and lovely and engaging, but a few of them have really gone above and beyond – like inviting us out sailing,” Lee said. “It’s a great way to get to know the community.”
As the volunteers resume their retirement and become patrons once again, Sawer said lending a helping hand has been an enjoyable experience.
“We learned some things, for sure,” Sawer said. “All of us have a brand new appreciation to now know what goes on back there… These people work really hard, they’re very passionate about what they do.”
