Helen Left Her Binder By The Side Door

Cedar Valley News
May 28, 2026
Helen Left Her Binder By The Side Door
By Chloe Papadakis

The summer festival planning meeting opens at seven on a Thursday evening, in the room behind the community hall where the heating system makes its small noises. Twelve of us are at the long table. A pitcher of water and a stack of paper agendas sit between us. Helen kept the vendor binder for fourteen years. Helen wore reading glasses on a chain and kept her notes in pencil. Helen finally stepped down in October. The agenda calls for nominations for chair.

The room is quiet.

Someone says, “We’ll just figure it out later.” The meeting moves to the next item.

I have sat in this room for several years now, in the back, taking notes on the gatherings the town has and the ones it has stopped having. The summer festival will happen this July because last year’s volunteer team is willing to do it one more time without a chair. Next year, I am not certain.

Helen’s binder is in a cardboard box by the side door, waiting for whoever will pick it up. The binder has tabs for vendors, parking, permits, the contact at the fire department, the contact at the school for the loaner risers, and a single sheet of paper at the back, which says, in Helen’s careful handwriting, the pie lady arrives at six. It is a fourteen-year-old object. Helen will not be back to explain it.

This is not a Cedar Valley problem. The U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps published their 2023 Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement in November of last year. The headline number is 28.3 percent — the share of Americans who formally volunteered through an organization in the survey year. The rate had recovered from the pandemic floor. It had not recovered to where it was before. It sits 1.7 points below pre-pandemic.

In Williamsville, New York, the Glen Park Art Festival, in its sixteenth year, will not happen in 2026. The council president named the reasons honestly. In British Columbia, the Buccaneer Days parade and the Oak Bay Tea Party parade canceled this spring. The boards used the same plain words: a shortage of volunteers, a shortage of someone willing to chair.

Back at our meeting, a young mother on the committee, with her daughter asleep in a stroller beside her, asks the question I have been waiting for. “Can’t we just hire someone to chair?”

I want to say yes. I want to say there is a way to pay for what Helen did. The answer is no, and the reason is the part of the work no one wants to name. The chair is not a job description. The chair is the person who calls the pie lady in March, remembers her name, knows her husband had heart surgery last fall, and notices when she does not show up at the meeting and calls to ask if she is all right. The chair is the person who is in relationship with the people who make the event happen.

A paid chair is a contractor. A real chair is a neighbor. The two are not the same job.

The events the town counts on are not held up by buildings or budgets or traditions. They are held up, year after year, by the one person who has been in the chair. When the person leaves, the event continues for a year or two on the residue of her relationships. Then it stops.

The Buccaneer Days parade in Esquimalt is not coming back this year. The Glen Park Art Festival is not coming back this year. In some towns the parade comes back after a pause. In some towns it does not. There is no rule. There is only who is willing.

I think about Helen’s binder by the side door. I think about my daughter, who will be old enough to come to the summer festival in two more years, and the festival she will come to depends on someone in this room tonight.

The agenda has moved on. There is still time. The chair seat at the back of the room is empty. Someone in Cedar Valley already knows whose seat it is.

Sit down.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Have you been the one in your town who took a seat on a committee — or stepped back from one? Tell us what you would want the next person in the chair to know. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps’ 2023 Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement, the cancellation of the Glen Park Art Festival in Williamsville, New York, and the cancellations of the Buccaneer Days and Oak Bay Tea Party parades referenced in this editorial are real.

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