Before high school
Looking for somewhere to volunteer
I went looking for volunteer hours and couldn't find anything open to me. There was no page for it, only scattered Facebook posts.
About NVO
A free volunteer board covering all 12 Niagara municipalities.
Niagara is not short of places that need volunteers. It's short of one place to find them.
Niagara Volunteer Opportunities covers all 12 municipalities, from St. Catharines to Fort Erie. Organizations post what they need, anyone can browse and apply, and it's free on both sides.
Why I started it
I'm Dax Tigley, a Grade 12 student at DSBN Academy. NVO started as a personal project in my Grade 9 year and I still run it.
Before I got to high school I went looking for somewhere to volunteer and struggled to find anything open to me. There was no page for it and nothing anyone could hand me, so what I actually had to work with was scattered Facebook posts. The volunteering itself was good once I got there. Everything leading up to it was not.
So I built the page I could not find. I want the place I live to be better, and that isn't something one person does alone. Niagara already has people doing the work, usually in small organizations with nobody spare to go out and find volunteers. Putting all of it in one place was the part I could help with.
What I'm looking forward to most is meeting the people who run these organizations and working alongside them instead of on my own.
You're never writing to a support queue. Questions, corrections and complaints come straight to me at dax@paragonmediacanada.ca.
How we got here
From a few Facebook posts to a site for all of Niagara
July 11, 2023
The NVO Facebook group opens
The first version of NVO was a Facebook group where local opportunities got shared in one place as they came up. It's still running.
Grade 9
A personal project
Through Grade 9 I kept it going on my own, finding opportunities and posting them so the next person wouldn't have to hunt the way I did.
September 2026
The website goes live
niagaravolunteer.ca launches, covering all twelve Niagara municipalities. Every organization is confirmed before its listings go up.
September 2026
Meeting organizations at Brock
I took NVO to the volunteer fair at Brock University and talked with the organizations there about posting their opportunities.
September 2026
Organizations get their own sign-in
Organizations can now sign in to post opportunities, see who applied, take attendance and record hours, all free.
Who it's for
High school students working through the 40 community involvement hours Ontario asks for. Listings that count wear a green badge, and the Student Hub explains the rules without the jargon.
College and university students at Brock and Niagara College who want to volunteer near where they study, for a placement or just to get to know the region they've moved to.
Anyone else in Niagara with time to give. Plenty of what gets posted here has no school requirement attached at all. If you have a free Saturday and want to be useful, browse the opportunities. The listings are the same ones the students see.
How listings get checked
Every organization's details are confirmed directly, by phone or email, before any of its opportunities publish. Nothing goes live unreviewed. That matters most for the high school students and younger volunteers using the site, and it's the part I won't cut corners on.
It has a cost, and I'd rather say so: there are 19 organizations I'm holding back right now because I haven't been able to confirm their details yet. They stay unpublished until I can. A directory that lists everything it finds fills up faster; this one is meant to be right.
Every listing also has a report link, and the reports come to me. Use it if something looks off, like an out-of-date listing or a description that doesn't match the actual shift.
What it costs, and why
Nothing, for the organizations posting and for the volunteers applying. There's no paid tier waiting behind this one.
The plain reason is that I build websites as Paragon Media Canada, and I built this one. There was no bill for it, so there's nothing to pass on to the organizations posting here. A subscription is exactly the sort of thing that would keep the smaller ones off the site.
New opportunities also get shared in the NVO Facebook group (opens in a new tab) as they go up, if that's an easier way to keep an eye on things.