Why is community service and association leadership important for public servants?

Bob Fabien Zinga

Volunteering🌍 Leading with Integrity and Innovation with Ion-Mircea Ghinda

21 Jul 2025 · 3 min

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2:55

In this live interview, the host asks the guest why community service and association leadership matter for public servants. The guest emphasizes that volunteering strengthens communities and provides personal fulfillment, citing his own experiences at a Montreal food bank and tutoring French to refugee children in Ottawa, where he observed the joy and confidence it gave families. He then explains how diplomatic association leadership offers a different kind of service: in India he was expected to sit on boards, leading to roles on the CANZA board (Canada‑New Zealand‑Australia Association) as treasurer, where he guided financial decisions for an organization that supplies duty‑free diplomatic goods, and on the Club Canada board, which runs the embassy’s restaurant and social venue. These experiences illustrate how public‑sector professionals can extend their impact beyond their official duties through hands‑on volunteering and strategic governance of diplomatic community institutions.

Questions this video answers

Volunteering helps address real community needs, builds empathy, and brings visible joy to beneficiaries, while association leadership offers public servants a platform to influence diplomatic community resources, practice financial stewardship, and foster social cohesion among diplomats.

Chapters

Right? So you really have to keep up with the technology, keep up with innovation, and keep up with the pace. Now, having said that, you've, you've held leadership roles in CANSA and the ACFE Ottawa chapter. And by the way, Maryam Emdan from Canada is from Ottawa as well. So there is a huge representation of your folks on LinkedIn Live right now. And for those watching us live on LinkedIn or YouTube, if you have a question for Jan, please type it in the comment. I'm going to make sure he answers it. By the end of the program today. So my question for you, Yan, why is community service and association leadership important for public servant?
Well, very good question. I, I believe that volunteering, it's very important to help the community wherever you are able to volunteer, wherever you're able to donate your time. It helps, you know, there's people who definitely need our help, uh, be it in, uh, food bank, which I volunteered, uh, in when I used to live in Montreal or in, you know, we used to have volunteering in Ottawa to help the refugees' children learn French. You know, they would go to school and they would need a tutor and a lot of times, you know, they're looking for people who spoke French to help the children and I would go there and I would work with other lovely persons to help the children to learn and you would see like the happiness on their face, you know, and the parents would come over and they would be really happy that somebody is able to teach their kids to speak the language and, you know, give them a head start in life. From the point of view of associations, I was a bit spoiled from the fact that when I was in India, they were expecting us at the High Commission to actually be on at least one or two boards. So they would have these boards that would aim to be sort of auxiliary to what we were doing, but they were actually allowing us to have a different kind of leadership. I was on the CANZA board. So CANZA was the Canadian— Canada, New Zealand, Australia Association, and its purpose was to provide diplomats with duty-free diplomatic goods. But that wasn't just the diplomats, it was also the embassy. So we have— we had a— like, CANZA has a number of embassies that they were actually having as clients, and It was actually a very good experience from the point of view that I was the treasurer and I was able to attend board meetings. I was able to guide the financial decisions of this association, so that was a very good experience. I was also on the board of Club Canada, which was like the embassy's restaurant and pub that the diplomats would use, you know, to decompress and to, you know, have events.