16 June 2023
This month 125 volunteers will be honoured for their commitment to Harbour Hospice as it celebrates an important milestone – 40 years of caring for its community.
National Volunteer Week runs from 18-24 June, and throughout the week 125 Harbour Hospice volunteers and 25 staff members will be presented with Long Service Awards for five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and an incredible 35 years.
“Our Long Service Awards give us an opportunity to show our volunteers just how much we appreciate them, as well as thank them for their dedication, hard work and loyalty,” says Harbour Hospice Chief Executive Jan Nichols.
“This year’s awards are even more special because they fall in our 40th year of service. It was a pioneering group of volunteers who founded Hospice 40 years ago, with the hope of providing the community with much-needed support that wrapped around patients and their families during illness and bereavement.
“We are a much bigger operation now, staffed by around 230 and supported by more than 1200 volunteers. But what is extraordinary is that volunteers have always remained an integral part of the services Harbour Hospice provides.”
From driving patients to appointments, to writing patients' life stories or visiting them – from working in the hospice gardens, kitchens or shops, fundraising for Hospice or creating floral arrangements for the three sites, Harbour Hospice volunteers are vital to its service. In the last year, 1200 Harbour Hospice volunteers gave the charity $2.79 million worth of their time, skills and energy (based on minimum wage). Their support enabled Harbour Hospice to care for 1239 patients and their families.
“Without the dedicated support of our volunteers – whether they were there at the start or joined us last year – we are incredibly grateful to them all,” says Nichols. “Without our volunteers we couldn’t provide the community with the level of palliative care that we do.”
