Sam Sinjari’s Record of Volunteer Service

More than a decade of showing up: work shoes for people starting a job, Thanksgiving dinners for families who would not otherwise have one, socks for people sleeping rough, board games for children in care. None of it was part of a job description. That is the point.

Seven hundred pairs of work shoes

Through the Unemployed Help Centre, Sam has donated more than 700 pairs of work shoes to people entering employment programs. It is a specific kind of help, and the specificity is what makes it work: someone who has found a job but cannot show up to it in the shoes they own is stopped by a problem that costs sixty dollars to solve.

Nobody writes a press release about footwear. It is simply what was needed.

Meals, socks, and Thanksgiving

At Windsor’s Downtown Mission, Sam has provided meals and socks — socks being, as every shelter worker will tell you, the item most needed and least donated. Through Hand in Hand Support he has provided Thanksgiving dinners and turkeys to families who would otherwise have gone without the holiday.

And board games for children in care: a small thing that means an afternoon of ordinary childhood for a kid whose year has held very little of it.

Service on community boards

Sam has served on the boards of Crime Stoppers of Windsor & Essex County, Hydrocephalus Canada, the College of Audiologists and Speech-Language Pathologists of Ontario, and the Rotary Club of Windsor. Board work is the unglamorous end of community service — governance, budgets, and long meetings — and it is where organizations either stay healthy or quietly fail.

Recognition

That record earned Sam the Queen Elizabeth II Ontario Medal for Good Citizenship, awarded to a small number of Ontarians for outstanding, long-term community service, and the Community Champion Award from the Odette School of Business at the University of Windsor.

The awards matter less than what they measure: a decade of consistency. Anyone can give once. Giving for ten years, without a title attached, is a habit rather than a gesture.

Why it belongs on a campaign site

Not as a credential. A record of service is simply the most honest evidence available about how someone behaves when nothing is at stake and no one is watching — which is a reasonable thing for voters to want to know about a candidate for mayor.

Where Sam Sinjari stands

Sam’s giving has never come with a paycheque or a title. It is a personal commitment to his neighbours, and it is the same spirit he intends to bring to the mayor’s office. Hear more of these stories on Empowering Kindness. (Campaign position.)

Sources: AM800 CKLW, the Windsor Star, Biz X Magazine, Windsorite.ca and Windsor News Today, reporting on Sam Sinjari’s volunteer record; Unemployed Help Centre, Windsor’s Downtown Mission and Hand in Hand Support.