The CMEA needs volunteers to assist in ensuring our content is vibrant, complete, accurate and timely to meet the goals and objectives of the CMEA.
Openings
Unit and Chapter Reporters: We need people to alert us to newsworthy events happening in their areas and in their chapters. News items can be in English or French and should include photos when possible. Bilingual items can be published as Chimo Communiqués and distributed across the CME Branch. Unilingual articles can be published as News Items and repeated in the weekly Newsbrief. Other news might be disseminated on Social Media.
Photo Editors: Many of the photos we receive are of poor quality and require significant editing and enhancement. If you have skills or want to develop skills PhotoShop, GIMP or similar photo editing software packages, we have some challenges for you.
Translators: We strive to publish all entries in English and French. As we are not able to use official government translation services we rely on volunteers. If you can spend an hour or so each week, we can provide scripts, mostly in English, to be translated.
Web Editors: People with experience developing and maintaining web pages are also needed. We have a considerable number of archived articles and attachments that need to be uploaded to the site and very few people available to do the work.
Social Media Gurus: If you have skills using Social Media, but more importantly, know how to use it more effectively to forward the goals and objectives of the CMEA, we can use your help.
Projects
We have a number of projects and initiatives underway. If you can help, please let us know:
Let No Sapper Be Forgotten: While we have written over 2600 Last Posts, we still have the names of over 2000 members of the CME family who do not have Last Post entries. We need researchers to help research service records, post-service career records, funeral and burial details, as well as locate appropriate photographs. We need writers to help compile Last Post entries, and Web Editors to upload the entries.
Valour & Courage: We have made good progress on building a feature describing awards for bravery and distinguished service through our long history, especially for the Second World War. We have a start on the First World War, but we have little to nothing on Korea, Afghanistan or Peacekeeping operations. We want to develop entries with background information, photographs and citations for every bravery award ever given to a member of the CME family. The work starts with research and is completed with a vignette recognizing the circumstances leading to the award.
Engineer Memorials: We have assembled a significant collection of memorials that recognize Canadian Military Engineers. Many are published in Chapter 5 of our book: “Customs of the Canadian Military Engineers. [See: https://cmea-agmc.ca/sites/default/files/chapter_5_red_book_20_july_2018_e.pdf ] . We need someone to work with our units to seek out their heritage of those personnel in their history for whom they have established a trophy, memorial, or other honour. We have a collection describing over 100 monuments and memorials that simply needs to be formatted so it can be displayed on our website.
Faces to Graves - The Netherlands: We are supporting a project in The Netherlands that is working to put a ‘Soldier Story’ to every Canadian soldier in the Canadian War Graves in The Netherlands. There are some 143 Sappers in these cemeteries that need a story written for them. [See: https://cmea-agmc.ca/faces-gravesseven-stories-down134-go ]. Meaningful stories can be created primarily from the information on the Service File and the Unit War Diary that can be downloaded. We are looking for a number of individuals who have an interest either in a particular Sapper, a unit, or perhaps those from their home town.
Engineer Heritage Moments: We have three dozen short stories that represent all facets of CME history and achievement covering Canadian Military Engineering across the eras and illustrate the breadth of our functions. [ See: https://cmea-agmc.ca/heritage-moments ]. We have dozens more drafted that simply require editing and refreshing so they can be published. We need writers to find new articles for the series.
Engineer Day in History: Our current set of short daily “On this Day in Engineer History“ articles on the Home Page [ https://cmea-agmc.ca/ ] was a first attempt and there is much room for improvement. We need volunteers to work with units to identify dates of significance to their unit. Other volunteers can identify actions from our “Valour and Courage” dBase and capture events that led to individuals receiving significant honours or awards.
Contact
If you are interested, can help or have any questions, please contact the CMEA Webmaster.