In our final post for National Volunteer Week we’d love you to meet the people behind the people!
Sally (pictured left) joined the Foundation in 2019, taking over from Trish (centre) as our Volunteer Manager. Sally does a wonderful job looking after a huge team of more than 400 volunteers, and has been focused on increasing capacity and developing teams across different areas of our hospitals.
Trish is well known to many of our volunteers having managed the Foundation’s Volunteer Service for 13 years, where she steadily grew our volunteer family. For the last 4 years Trish has also enjoyed co-ordinating the busy Kenepuru Volunteer Team.
Wendy has a nursing background and now enjoys co-ordinating the Emergency Department Volunteer Team, who she says display such warmth and compassion for patients who unexpectedly find themselves in hospital.
Sally explained that people’s kindness, generosity and commitment to hospital volunteering is extremely valuable and their work makes an enormous difference to staff, patients and their families. “Every month volunteers gift an incredible 700 hours to our hospitals, and that doesn’t even include the hours of work done by our crafty volunteers who last year donated 8431 knitted, sewn or quilted items. Thanks to all our dedicated volunteers for their incredible mahi!”
He aha te mea nui o te Ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people, it is the people, it is the people.