Laurie Harley is NOTL's Citizen of the Year

It still hasn’t fully sunk in for Laurie Harley that she was presented with the Lord Mayor’s Award of Excellence as Niagara-on-the-Lake’s 2023 Citizen of the Year at the NOTL Chamber of Commerce’s annual Spirit Awards last week. 

“I would have been happy just to be a loser,” Harley said as she took the podium at Ravine Vineyard Tuesday. “This is so unbelievable, but it’s not for me, really. This award belongs to a whole bunch of people, and I could never name them all.” 

The long-time volunteer with the old NOTL Hospital Auxiliary, the Shaw Guild and the NOTL Museum was being recognized for her role in developing and maintaining the NOTL Ambassadors program, which began as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“It was Counc. Wendy Cheropita and Gary Burroughs who suggested that instead of hiring enforcement people, they could go to the Shaw to help the town,” Harley tells The Local. “We weren’t doing anything at the Shaw because it was closed down. We partnered with them to put some resources on the street.”

As the recovery phase coming out of the first wave of the pandemic began, the Ambassadors’ role was originally to remind people about social distancing and other safe behaviours to stem the spread of COVID-19. Their blue shirts and masked faces were ubiquitous that summer as tourists began to trickle back into town. 

“But we recognized that it wasn’t keeping people safe that was the key to this,” Harley says. “It was greeting people, answering their questions and welcoming them. That was the spark. We went back to the town and told them this was a really good idea. We wanted to keep it going.” 

Harley and other volunteers then began studying “every other ambassador program we could find” to glean some best practices to borrow as they designed a unique program for NOTL. Harley says Banff, Alberta’s ambassador program particularly stood out in the minds of the steering committee, which included volunteers, Town council members, tourism stakeholders and representatives from the Chamber of Commerce. 

“Once (former CAO) Marnie Cluckie got us a grant,” remembers Harley, “we were able to put together a comprehensive training program together. It includes classroom sessions and site visits.” 

Those site visits, she says, are extremely important. Last year the volunteers went to 20 different locations in NOTL, including wineries, galleries, Fort George and others, to find out what each wanted the ambassadors to communicate to visitors.

In 2023, 56 volunteers were part of the Ambassadors Program. Over 17 weeks, they made personal connections with more than 8,500 visitors from over 60 countries

“We’re not tour guides,” Harley insists. “We’re not scripted. We have our own stories as residents here, and that’s what we use to engage in conversation with visitors.”

Harley’s own story as a resident of NOTL began two years before she and her husband Douglas moved here in 2006.

After she retired from IBM Canada she moved into consulting and the couple bought a home in Muskoka. They had vacationed there often and thought it would be a wonderful place to live.

“But we had never spent a winter in Muskoka,” she laughs. “That changed the picture considerably. We felt that Niagara-on-the-Lake had a climate that was a little more temperate. We rented down here for a couple of years to make sure we didn’t make the same mistake twice.”

Harley fell in love with the “whole beauty of this place” and knew she wanted to stay. She joined the hospital auxiliary, and became active on its board. That group of volunteers became obsolete, though, when the hospital closed in 2015. Then someone suggested to her that she should volunteer to be a docent at the Shaw Festival.

“I didn’t even know what a docent was,” laughs Harley. “But I thought I would give it a try. I loved that, then I got on the executive committee as the activities chair. I planned education and social events for the volunteers. The beauty of the Shaw is there’s such a range of activities to take part in, and you can work your way through all those roles.”

Along the way she also joined the board at the NOTL Museum. Last year, as chair of the fundraising committee, she helped organize the museum’s Heritage Garden Party. She has stepped off of that board for the time being but knows she will be out helping with the annual polo event this fall. 

Still flabbergasted by being named Citizen of the Year, she marvels that she was honoured last week alongside people she has worked with and for whom she has the utmost respect. People such as Tim Jennings of Shaw, winner of the Business Leadership Award, NOTL Museum curator and managing director Sarah Kaufman, who was presented with the Community Leadership Award, and Vintage Hotels’ Paul McIntyre, winner of this year’s Chamber of Commerce Award. 

“It never dawned on me that I would be Citizen of the Year,” Harley says. “I didn’t even know what award I was nominated for until they announced it. What’s beautiful about this award is that it really puts volunteers into the spotlight in this town. The talent we have that volunteer in this town - bankers, architects, educators, health care professionals - you name it, we can do anything.”

Like most volunteers, she loves meeting people and working alongside other like-minded individuals. And Harley has advice for anyone thinking about putting their own unique talents forward as a volunteer in town. 

“It has to be fun, that’s a part of it,” she explains. “Know yourself, know what you love and don’t love to do. If you can find roles that allow you to do that as a volunteer, then you’ve got it made.”