Operation Red Nose Lethbridge celebrating a ‘successful’ 2022 after a two-year hiatus

While the volunteer drive service had originally planned to run for nine nights, on December 23, 2022, they saw a shortfall in volunteers and had to suspend operation.

Hong told LNN, “I think quite a few variables and factors went into play for why we struggled so much with volunteers that day.”

“I guess one of our big ones is that most of our volunteers come from our student athletes with the Pronghorns,” she said. “But of course, by that time, all of their finals are done, most of them have gone home for the Christmas break, so we didn’t have most of them; probably about 90% of them were not here.”

Despite the one-night closure, their eight-night run raised nearly $15,000 in donations to go towards the University of Lethbridge (U of L) Pronghorns Athletics Team.

The U of L Pronghorns Athletic team has been running the volunteer initiative in the community for 26 years, and Hong says they have no plans of stopping next year.

Hong continued, “It’s a service that we feel very strongly about to be able to offer in Lethbridge. It’s certainly unique in its offering.”

While ORN doesn’t track the number of calls coming in, they were able to accommodate almost all of those who requested service.

“What we saw a lot this year is that we actually had a lot of people call in trying to book the service without a vehicle, kind of like a taxi service, but that’s not the service we provide,” she said.

“For the most part, we were able to accommodate everyone except for on New Year’s Eve,” Hong explained. “We had to shut off the phones an hour earlier than we typically would because by the time 12:30 p.m. rolled around, our wait time was about an hour and 15 to an hour 20 minutes.”

Hong went on to thank all the volunteers and sponsors for their help in supporting Operation Red Nose this year.

She added, “We didn’t know what our expectations should be coming into it after our two-year hiatus with everything going on, so ultimately, the numbers that we saw were a huge success and huge win for us.”

by Sarah Jones

Operation Red Nose Lethbridge celebrating a ‘successful’ 2022 after a two-year hiatus

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