Thank you, volunteers! We couldn’t have done it without you!

Someone once said, “Those who can do, do. Those who can do more, volunteer.”

Volunteers are some of the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect the world’s compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain loving one another.

And at OpenMedia, we didn’t want another day to go by before thanking the beautiful souls working behind the scenes to help us, and to help you, save the open, surveillance-free Internet we all love.         

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. But today at OpenMedia we choose to celebrate and be grateful for the amazing group of people who’ve made our work more effective and successful. They’re our most engaged supporters and we couldn’t have done any of it without them.

To all our volunteers: your willingness to show up and deliver on short notice, fight against endless spreadsheets filled with data — most of the time unintelligible to us —  help with HR work, content, tabling, legal expertise, multimedia and more, has contributed a great deal to this year’s accomplishments and wins.

So without any further ado, here are some very special people we’d like to acknowledge:

Thank you to Jesse Schooff for tabling for us at Media Democracy Days 2015, and offering your insightful blogs on freedom of expression that we often featured on our website and social media platforms. Check out his blog at GeekMan.ca.

Big appreciations to the great Gilles Bureau, our go-to volunteer when we needed French translations with very short notice. Your fast responses impressed us all here at the office, Gilles, thank you!

As a fast-paced, growing organization, we have also dedicated time developing our internal governance and human resources practices and structures. We are immensely grateful for the HR expertise provided by Shaun, Anjana and Supreeti - who are all Knowledge Philanthropists sourced through Vantage Point’sGoVolunteer site. We also had Ryan offer us invaluable pro-bono legal advice for our compliance and governance review – thank you!

Throughout the year we were privileged to  work with some skilled volunteer data analysts, such as Esther, Rozali and Michael, who helped us become smarter in our work and data-driven in our decisions.

A special thank you to Esther for helping to develop a comprehensive Facebook Advertising strategy!

Rozali was instrumental in parsing the many great responses from our supporter survey, which helped us better understand our community. For that she deserves a round of applause!

Finally, Michael spent the last few weeks of this year doing tremendous work on analysing literally millions of emails that OpenMedia sends every year. It was a gargantuan task, but Michael managed to derive valuable insights for various teams within the organization.

In May, we launched Canada’s Privacy Plan, a crowdsourced pro-privacy report packed with recommendations on how to roll back surveillance in Canada. Huge thanks to our talented intern and Communications Assistant Stephanie Schoenhoff for co-writing this important piece! Volunteer Junoh Kim offered his great skills to put all the important information on this report into a beautiful infographic. Check it out here!

A big thanks and shoutout to Dustin (pictured in the yellow hat), who helped compiling valuable data on mobile traffic to our websites, as well as organize our Privacy Plan Launch Party in Vancouver earlier this year. It was a fun and inspiring event for the local community, as we celebrated rejecting fear and breaking free from the surveillance state with our freshly launched Pro-Privacy plan. Dustin helped pull all the event planning pieces together behind the scenes and chipped in to make all the fun things make happen, including a photobooth, facepainting, music, drinks, t-shirt printing, and more. Thanks Dustin!

Meryl and Miriam, thank you for all your help supporting some of her hard work during the summer with the behind the scenes data work that made our elections Candidates tool possible, and for your support with resources for our C-51 and Access work.

And thank you Kaylin for helping us tag our blogs so the migration to our new website could happen as smooth as possible. 

Thank you to Peter who helped transcribe our Save the Link video into 15 languages so people all over the world could enjoy it! And speaking of our Save the Link video, thank you so much to Diana and Michael of Reach.video who worked tirelessly to write, design and animate this two-minute run down of thow the link is at threat and what we can do to save it. You two are amazing!

Our Campaigns Manager, Josh Tabish, would like to extend his sincerest thanks to the Access Dream Team, a group of open Internet advocates, experts, and evangelists who have provided thoughtful, detailed input over the past year on topics ranging from Bell’s Mobile TV case, to Videotron’s violation of Net Neutrality, to the ongoing (and simultaneous) appeals by Bell at the CRTC and Cabinet, and many many more we can’t name here! To the Access Dream Team (you know who you are) we say: Thank You!

And last, but not least, huge appreciation to Andrew Currie, the author and compiler of everyday's Daily Digital Digest, and one of the most dedicated volunteers OpenMedia's ever had.

So here's to all our volunteers, those dedicated people who truly believe in OpenMedia’s work towards a free and open Internet. Your hard work benefits not only our small team, but countless web users worldwide.

If you want to become an OpenMedia volunteer, there are plenty of ways you can help out! Just visit https://openmedia.org/en/work for more info. We hope to hear from you soon.