The Other LEAF

I have several Lawyer Friends. Most are human rights and labour lawyers. We have some good conversations - but the discussions have had to change recently because of my current place of employment and the fact that one of them works for the firm that represents the union where I work.

I am not part of the union. Part of my job is to audit the union. Massive conflicts there. Change of topic required. Like who we each do volunteer work for - we both volunteer with Toronto oranizations who use the acronym "LEAF".

I volunteer with Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests. They volunteer with the Womens Legal Education & Action Fund.

You can imagine our initial confusion when we were each going to events the other did not know about. I now refer to the one I volunteer with as "the other LEAF", since there are several of them and just one of me.

I've been volunteering with my LEAF for almost 2 years. I do mostly photography, but pretty much anything else they ask that I have time and interest to do - anything from writing on popsicle sticks, to community outreach to working on documents, selling stuff at merch tables, setting up photo exhibits and recently appearing in their promo video.

They are a passionate group of tree-lovers. No matter what time of day or night I drop by the office - there is always someone there working.

Their 4th Annual celebration was this past Friday at the Artscape Wychwood Barns (photos in this post). I was shocked when, while helping to set up the event (which involved turning the Wychwood Barn space into an indoor urban forest) on the afternoon of, I was informed that I was going to receive one of two "volunteer of the year" awards later that night. (holy comma splice, I know)

I talked to the other award recipient, Christine before we both went up to receive our awards - we were both equally shocked. We really had no idea that people say "no" to things that LEAF asks them to do and we'd both never been asked to do something we didn't actually want to do. We both really didn't think we did that much. After some discussion we realized that we'd only met once before at the video shoot (we also realized why we'd been asked to be in this year's video). We do completely opposite things for LEAF, we both have cars, are both "older" (in comparison to the average LEAF volunteer) - and we usually say "yes". If you were to draw a venn diagram of what we do there would be minimal overlap, hence never before meeting.

Of all the organizations I've done and do volunteer work with (a lot), LEAF is definitely filled with the most passionate people. Perhaps it is the youth of the organization, perhaps it is the type of work they do and the people that work attracts - but that combination of people, goals and work has built a caring, hard-working, team of genuinely nice people.

... and they say "thank you" a lot.

Thanks LEAF.

/<.

You can see some of the other photos I've done for LEAF here

Or in full-screen slide show form - here