Volunteers

A family affair

Amy Young named Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Nova Scotia Volunteer of the Year

By Linda Browne April 23, 2025

Amy Young, Nova Scotia Volunteer of the Year

If you’ve ever attended a Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) event in the Maritimes, you’ve likely met Amy Young.

She’s long been a friendly, familiar face at Ducks Unlimited Canada fundraising dinners and auctions not just in her home province of Nova Scotia, but in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island as well.

Young’s passion and enthusiasm for Ducks Unlimited Canada’s work and mission runs deep and, in her case, it’s something that very much runs in the family.

She started volunteering with Ducks Unlimited Canada about 17 years ago, when her husband Jamie (whose parents started Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Truro chapter) began working for the organization. Prior to that, the pair had attended many of Ducks Unlimited Canada’s dinners and auctions in the area “and always enjoyed them,” Young says, getting better acquainted with the organization and its work along the way.

She started assisting with the Colchester committee’s event and soon started lending a hand with events in neighbouring provinces. Today, she estimates that she assists with about 15 dinners a year, usually in the role of treasurer, but also helping with set up, take down, and whatever else needs to be done. She’s also stepped up to the plate to run various dinners when her husband was occupied with Ducks Unlimited Canada events in other regions. For her dedication and commitment to Ducks Unlimited Canada, we’re proud to name Young as Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Nova Scotia Volunteer of the Year.

Today, though, she’s busy being a mom, just arriving home with her 8-year-old son Jayden and letting her dogs outside for some fresh air.

“I enjoy the outdoors – our whole family enjoys the outdoors; we hunt, we fish. So conservation is a big part of us,” she says over the phone from her home in Valley in Colchester County.

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It's not for our future; it's for our son's future as well. So, we're getting him involved…because we need to get that new generation in to carry on with DUC.

Amy Young

As she looks back upon almost two decades of volunteering with DUC, Young counts the 75th anniversary gala in Moncton, N.B. as a personal highlight.

“I felt proud of myself, that they asked me to be the treasurer. And they gave me an award at the gala,” she recalls.

All the people she’s met while volunteering, she adds, have enriched her life in so many ways.

“They’re not even really volunteers now…a lot of them are like family to us. We’ve met a lot of really good friends, became close with a lot of people over the years,” she says, pointing to a couple who ran a DUC dinner in New Brunswick, retired, and ended up purchasing a place just around the corner from her family’s cottage. “Now we’re hanging out with them all the time,” she says.

That is, of course, when she and Jamie aren’t busy hosting a Ducks Unlimited Canada event somewhere. As she goes through her calendar of events for the next few days, it’s enough to make even the most adept scheduler sweat a little. But she takes it all in stride.

“Our fall and spring is pretty much always booked with DUC’s dinners,” she laughs.

But for Young, all the effort is well worth it. Volunteering with Ducks Unlimited Canada, she notes, is a great way to have a local impact in a national organization.

“We need conservation, we need our wetlands, because we’re losing all this pretty quick. So we need to be able to raise funds to carry on with all of this…If it wasn’t for conservation, you wouldn’t have that nice drinking water, etcetera. So we need to preserve that,” she says.

“And it’s a great time to meet all kinds of new people and raise funds for the local communities.”

There are approximately 149 Ducks Unlimited Canada volunteers in Nova Scotia and 3,030 across Canada. Ducks Unlimited Canada is proud to recognize each of them—including outstanding leaders like Amy Young—as volunteer champions and conservationists who make waves and together, create ripples of change by serving with generosity, passion and dedication.

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Volunteers

A family affair

Amy Young named Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Nova Scotia Volunteer of the Year

Inspired by Amy’s story?

Read These Stories Next

Bettylou Christenson, British Columbia Volunteer of the Year

Layton Ford, New Brunswick Volunteer of the Year

Eric Shaw, Prince Edward Island Volunteers of the Year