Not because I didn’t care. Not because I was reckless. I failed because I answered one question as a human being rather than as a compliance officer.
The question was whether a person with a criminal record could volunteer to help with vulnerable people in a non-profit in Toronto. I answered yes. It seemed obvious. I was thinking of a woman I met during a project I was doing concerning Legal Aid.
When she was 18, she was caught as a found in – in a bar fight. Her boyfriend—later convicted of serious offences—had slipped a switchblade into her purse without her knowledge during the police raid. The boyfriend disappeared.
She pleaded guilty to a criminal charge at age 19 to avoid jail on a first offence. Decades later, at a parole hearing, the boyfriend admitted the knife was his. Nothing changed on her record. It may have helped him with his. She is now 62, a grandmother, steady, generous, and deeply decent. In my mind, of course she could volunteer.
But the correct answer according to the test, it turns out, was no. A criminal record with no stay, pardon, or dismissal can mean a lifetime ban on volunteering.
I sat there longer than I expected, not so much annoyed as nonplussed. My error wasn’t factual; it was philosophical. I had answered the question that lives in the real world but the test was also asking a different one. Though it didn’t say so: not can a person with a criminal record officially volunteer – they often cannot – but should we ever take the risk of allowing it? The safe answer was exclusion. Always exclusion.
We talk endlessly about compassion fatigue and volunteer burnout, as if people have simply stopped caring. But moments like this suggest something else is going on. The system itself not only engages in constructive lifetime bans, it is quietly training people not to engage—to flatten their judgment, to suppress memory, to answer against their own experience.
This wasn’t the only question. Four others were about women’s shoes—what footwear is appropriate for which volunteer tasks. The specificity was remarkable. The logic was consistent. As a male, I did not know about which women’s shoes to wear (flats, clogs, heels, sandals) and 5 wrong answers meant I had to redo the test to volunteer in a meals program I had already participated in for 15 years.
But let’s go back to the lifetime ban.
What struck me most was not the ban itself, but its permanence. A lifetime exclusion, with no mention of time passed, mitigating factors, offence relevance, rehabilitation and maturity, or context. Canadian law recognizes all of those things. Human beings do too. Volunteer criteria often do not.
And this is where the conversation about compassion and fatigue goes wrong. It assumes people are retreating because they no longer feel empathy. But what if they’re retreating because the terms of engagement have become so brittle, so distrustful, so detached from reality, that participation requires pretending not to know what you know and bans you for life 40 years after full restitution and documented innocence.
I’ve volunteered for nearly four decades. Boards, meals, lectures, committees. I’ve seen systems work and fail; people stumble and recover. I’ve learned that the best volunteers are rarely the most pristine. They are often the ones who understand how easily life can go sideways, how much luck matters, how thin the line is between order and chaos.
A system that cannot imagine redemption is not a system designed for compassion. It is designed for risk management. And risk management, dressed up as morality, quietly drains the life out of civic engagement.
I didn’t fail the test because I was careless. I failed because I remembered someone. And that, increasingly, seems to be the wrong answer.