I take my hat off to all volunteers everywhere!!  Growing up we were encouraged to be involved in our community, it wasn’t viewed as anything unusual or different, it seemed to me that everyone did it.  Mum was involved in the Country Women’s Association, our school things, table tennis club and the local Technical And Further Education College council and probably more that I can’t think of at the moment.  Dad was in the Country Fire Service and heavily involved in the local football and cricket clubs.  He played cricket for years, coached junior teams and then became an umpire.

The tiny locality of Flaxley where I grew up

My sister and I played netball, table tennis and tennis and our brother played and umpired football and played tennis and table tennis.  I don’t remember if he played cricket or not, I’ll have to ask him.  In playing these sports we were involved in the helping out too.  It was just a natural thing, I don’t remember talk about voluntary jobs and paid jobs being different things.  My sister and I were in St John Cadets also.  As a result I’ve always been involved in ‘helping out’ and it’s grown to be a passion in my life.

Flaxley Methodist/Uniting Church, our youth group was often involved in helping out too.

I love working with an amazing bunch of people at Teen Challenge SA Inc, we’re all volunteers, with a great sense of purpose and calling to do the work we’re doing.  Teen Challenge provides residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation for young people as well as a range of other programs including – housing, community centres, youth programs, work programs, emergency financial assistance, counselling and more.

One day a week I run a community program through Teen Challenge which is open to people of all ages – I teach art classes and will be teaching computing again soon too and we have a shared lunch.

In genealogy I like to help people where I can.  In July I’ll be running a two day workshop, with my sister, about online genealogy and next school term I hope to be running some regular classes on online genealogy too.  I use the BillionGraves app on my Android phone and photograph headstones which are uploaded to the BillionGraves website for everyone to access.

I don’t tend to classify things in my mind as paid and unpaid.  If it’s something that I’m passionate about, such as helping people, and I can make a real contribution, then I’ll do it.

I didn’t want this to be an ‘I do this and I do that’ kind of post but just to highlight the great work done by volunteers everywhere and that we were raised to ‘do our bit’.