On Tuesday 7th June, we gathered together at the Pavilion Barkway to celebrate and say thank you to the wonderful volunteers that undoubtedly are the essential ingredient that makes Home-Start Royston, Buntingford & South Cambridgeshire tick.
Volunteer Week 2022 took place between 1st and 7th June, and this year Home-Start UK also hosted their very first Volunteer Festival. The festival took place between 31st May and 10th June, with activities, meet-ups and other volunteer-themed opportunities for people to dip into.
A well-attended thank you event
Our Barkway event was well attended, bringing together volunteers from a variety of roles within our organisation. We had people joining us who have been volunteering for many years, along with some of our newest recruits, and it was lovely to see everyone chatting together and sharing their experiences of Home-Start. And what better way to share our time together than with tea and cake, also an essential ingredient for Home-Start!!
Our Scheme Manager thanked our volunteers, saying a few words about their roles over the last couple of years, which have been varied and changing as we navigated our way through Covid and all the additional considerations we have had to work around. As usual, our volunteers embraced these challenges with patience, flexibility, creativity and resilience, reminding us how lucky we are to have such wonderful people running right through our charity.
Our wonderful volunteers
Our volunteers are involved in everything that we do. They support families, provide governance, stand on stalls, sell things on eBay, bake, input data – the list just goes on and on. Last year our volunteers gave us over 3800 hours of their time!! What an incredible commitment; we feel honoured to have such generous and caring people linked with our charity.
What is so special about Home-Start is that within it all, the ethos is about ensuring that the work our volunteers do with families is unique. They don’t go in with an agenda, a clipboard, a laptop or a form to fill in. They just quietly come alongside families, going at their pace, reflecting on their strengths and helping them to traverse the many challenges of family life that invariably present themselves to every parent at some point in their journey.
Saying thank you is a really important part of what we want to do for our volunteers. We look for opportunities to say thank you in different ways and at different times, trying to ensure that our gratitude for everything they bring to our charity runs through everything we do. Because, as we said at the beginning, volunteers are the essential ingredient of Home-Start, we wouldn’t be Home-Start without them!
If you would like to become a Home Visiting or Family Support Group volunteer for Home-Start, visit our volunteer page for more information or fill in our ‘contact us’ form here.