23 June 2023
Wilf Marley is a founding member of Harbour Hospice’s first trust, and 35 years on still sits on its board of trustees as our longest-serving volunteer. His very first task was to unite two groups who both wanted a hospice service but were competing for community support.
When Wilf Marley began volunteering for Harbour Hospice he couldn’t have imagined he’d still be involved more than three decades on. “But you get caught up in the energy,” he says. “And whenever I’ve thought about whether I’ve been there long enough or whether I’ve done enough, I couldn't get away from the privileged position that hospice staff and volunteers are in with the community and with families. When you continually see what is being achieved to relieve what is probably the worst time in a person and their family’s lives that's just so satisfying.”
Wilf became involved with Hospice after being asked for budgeting advice. It’s founding committee had been going for about three years, with a goal to create a hospice ‘homecare’ service for people on the North Shore, when a second group emerged wanting to raise funds for a Hospice Inpatient Unit on the Shore.
"I was approached by the second group because I was an accountant and they wanted budgeting help,” he explains. “So, I went to that first meeting and said, ‘I don’t think you can do what you’re doing, you’ve got to join up with the other group.’ They weren’t that pleased with that, but that’s effectively what happened.”
Wilf organised and facilitated two joint strategic planning meetings in 1988 and the two groups joined to form a single trust entity to progress the homecare service and establish an Inpatient facility. A Deed of Charitable Trust was signed on 12 December 1988, and the North Shore Hospice Trust – now the Harbour Hospice Board of Trustees - was born.
“If I had to single out my proudest moment it would be in the bringing together of those two hospice communities,” he says.
Wilf says he feels privileged to have worked alongside some extraordinary volunteers over the years, and to have been part of almost every major milestone Harbour Hospice has achieved, from the purchase of North Shore’s current site at Shea Tce to the merging of our Warkworth/Wellsford, Hibiscus Coast and North Shore communities to form one entity.
On a national level he spent 11 years on the board of Hospice New Zealand, nine of those as its chairman, and during this time collaboration between hospices around the country grew positively, as did hospice’s influence at national level.
He says it “wasn’t easy” in the founding years because health professionals did not take hospice volunteers seriously. “Hospice volunteers were considered fuzzy do-gooders, and I can recall being involved with a major meeting to try and set up a national palliative care organisation and the attitude of the medical specialists I would call condescending.
“But that’s totally changed now and that’s great to see.”
Despite its phenomenal growth Harbour Hospice has never lost its philosophy of care, Wilf says. “And that’s been very impressive. When organisations become very large they can tend to become what I call institutionalised. The focus can change and too much attention and resource is given to maintaining the growing organisation, rather than to what I call the coalface.
“Yet, we've always found leaders, people and volunteers who have been able to hold on to that essential core philosophy of hospice. And that's one of the reasons we've got such a good relationship with our community. I’m very proud of the organisation and very proud to be one of its board members.”
