Volunteer with Coast

Share your unique skills by volunteering with us!

Volunteer Mission

To engage the community to support Coast services by creating meaningful opportunities for volunteer involvement

Every year, close to 300 volunteers contribute over 5000 hours to supporting Coast’s work. From one-on-one positions to our amazing event volunteers, to our hardworking board members, our volunteers are integral to helping clients recover from mental illness.

As a Coast volunteer, you’ll share your time, skills, interests and energy to support clients on their path to realizing their potential, while overcoming individual challenges. Together with other members of the Coast team, you will help clients define and meet their own social, psychological, physical, recreational and spiritual goals.

A Coast volunteer role is a great fit for:

• Those who are considering or are already going to school for and/or working in the health care sector, social work, mental health rehabilitation and want to develop skills and experience working with individuals recovering from mental illness.
• Those who enjoy accompanying individuals or groups on outings, day-to-day tasks such as doctor’s appointments or grocery shopping, festivals and concerts, etc
• Those who love feel-good, personally rewarding volunteer experiences!

General Requirements:

• Must be 19 years of age
• Able to make a commitment for a period of six months
• Have a clear Criminal Records Check for Vulnerable Persons
• Have a annual flu shot
• Ability to respect confidentiality and maintain personal boundaries

We offer a variety of roles in different areas of our organization. We are currently accepting volunteers from the waitlist. To get added to the waitlist or for more information, contact our Volunteer Manager, Valri Pawlik.

Meet Coast’s volunteers!

Ayden Kinchla

Both my grandparents were psychologists. My grandpa was a psychology professor at Princeton so most of my visits almost always featured a walk through the centuries old campus and under the leering gargoyle facades. He would sit me down and talk to me about history and psychology and I still remember him blowing my mind with a talk on geometry and a demonstration of a Möbius strip. He thought people were fascinating, and I like to think he passed that interest on to me. My grandma was ecstatic when she heard I wanted to major in psychology at UBC. I had a very close friend who suffered from depression and PTSD while growing up in Los Angeles and I wanted to take my interest and apply it to something that could make a difference for people.

So when Dr. Barnes, my biopsychology professor, gave us the option to volunteer with people suffering mental illnesses, I leapt at it. He put me in touch with Val Mayne who talked to me about what I could do to help. I was obviously no therapist yet, to imagine anything of the sort was ridiculous, but I could spend time with people who didn’t always have other people to go to. I ran a Dungeons and Dragons club in high school, and I thought I could do something of the sort with Coast at Crossroads. I was of course hesitant because D&D requires a little more input from the players than the typical board game, but for the first couple months it actually worked. Eventually though, people lost interest and I had to learn how to be flexible and adjust the activities to suit people’s other wants and desires.

I really value the rapport I’ve built with several of the clients. There have been some ups and downs, and the days when nobody wants to do anything leave me a little discouraged. But when I show up to see people smiling and exciting to see me it makes the whole effort worth it. I’ve got more than a few of the residents to try something new and am doing my best to teach one of them how to play the guitar. Spending so much time around people with schizophrenia has inspired me to look more closely into the disease and focus several of my papers this year on information regarding the illness. 

My most memorable accomplishment happened last year when we were still regularly(ish) playing Dungeons and Dragons. After pitching it for a couple weeks, I finally got two of the residents interested enough to make characters. It was nearly impossible getting both of them interested at the same time, and whenever one of them wanted to play the other was either not home or uninterested. Yet finally, after running a couple of solo games with one or the other, they were both together and excited to participate. They joined forces and concluded an adventure to bring down a yeti necromancer who was terrorizing a small mountain town with specters and wolves. The stakes were high, the excitement was palpable, and after nearly facing their doom in a blizzard they struck the yeti with a bottle of alchemist’s fire (a natural 20 I might add) and saved the town’s cleric from a presumably grisly fate. They thought it was awesome, and as a Dungeon Master and a volunteer, that’s all I ever want to hear.