Tiffany Workinger: Royal City resident finds fulfillment in volunteering

In a small town, one of the most vital resources is volunteers, dedicated people who make good things happen for the whole community. Tiffany Workinger is one of those people.

“There’s a lot of research that says the more you help people, the more your happiness comes from helping people,” Workinger said. “And I definitely think that that’s true.”

Workinger should know. She’s volunteered to help with Summerfest, Royal City’s annual community celebration, for about eight years now. She was actually in charge of organizing it last year, she said, but this year she’s serving as treasurer while Carley Smith heads up the committee. She’s also been pivotal in SHOC, which stands for Strengthening the Heart of Our Community, an organization formed in 2006 to improve the look and livability of Royal City, and serves on the city council.

Workinger is a transplant to Royal City, having grown up in Junction City, Oregon, a town of 5,400 about half an hour outside of Eugene. She and her daughter Bailey came to Royal City about 15 years ago, she said.

“My brother ended up in Royal City. He was in Ephrata, then Quincy, and then Royal City. And I was coming with my daughter out here all the time to visit and he had kids, you know? I just loved it out here. And so after two years of visiting, I think, we finally moved out, just me and my daughter. It’s a great place to raise your kids.”

Sometimes, volunteerism is more serendipitous than intentional. Workinger hadn’t planned to get involved with Summerfest, but when asked, she stepped up.

“Somebody just asked me to come to a meeting like, ‘hey, we need some more people.’ And I would say it probably took maybe a year or two years before I felt like okay, I understand what’s going on. And once you get to be part of something, you just stay part of something.”

Summerfest is no small task. It’s a two--day extravaganza that just about takes over Royal City. There’s a parade, a car show, a quilt show, a fun run – all the things you expect to see in a small-town festival. You’d think it would take a large committee to put it together. Not so, said Workinger. It’s a small core of people who plan it, but community members step up once tasks are delegated.

“I think there’s four of us that work all year on it,” she said. “Those are the people that go to the meetings on a regular basis, once a month. And then like the day of, it’s a bunch of people that really help in smaller ways. The Godoys do the quilt show, and they’ve been doing it for several years now, so we just know they’re going to do it. The Christensens do the barbecue; we know they’re going to do it. Performance Tire does the car show. It just works really well, because the same people do the same thing every year.”

SHOC is another way Workinger gives back to the community, this time all year. SHOC was first formed in 2006, with the purpose of beautifying Royal City. They’ve done a lot of landscaping, put up benches along the streets, organize Christmas lights for the downtown businesses and recently cleaned up the entrance to the post office, getting rid of weeds, Workinger said.

Her work on the city council is necessary, Workinger said, but it has a set of frustrations that SHOC and Summerfest don’t. The city is bound by regulations that make things that should be simple really complicated, she explained.

We wanted to have a food truck come to town, and it ended up being a huge deal,” she said. “Like, the business that wanted to bring them in, where their property line is, and it’s so close to the city, and it’s so close to the park – it was hour-long conversations for something that should just be like, ‘Yeah, sure, that’s a great idea.”

Workinger worries that volunteerism is going to begin to dwindle, she said, because the people who do it are getting older and there aren’t enough younger residents to take their place.

“I think the people that work at the food bank are ladies that are probably in like their 70s and 80s,” she said. “They can’t lift the food; they always are looking for people that can come in and lift 50 pounds. And the cemetery, Royal City I think has one of the coolest cemeteries I’ve ever seen. It’s beautiful. It’s always beautiful, but there’s three people that do all of that, and they’re all older, retired people.”

Workinger saw a ray of hope in the town’s young people, she said, when a group of school kids painted the fence at the Moose Lodge and sold tickets for a circus that came to town at the beginning of June. The kids told her after the circus that they had had a surprisingly good time, she said.

“I think people don’t realize how much fun volunteering can be There’s some fulfillment that comes with volunteering that I think people have kind of forgotten or gotten away from.