Thank You for your Dedication to Hospice

Welcome back!   We are SO thrilled to have all our volunteers back on board this month at Level 1.

The Hospice felt like an empty shell without the North East valley volunteers and our shops were very sad indeed without their volunteers. We limped through level 2 & 3 without our full volunteer contingent, so it is truly wonderful to have the full team back now.

I know we say it all the time, but I have to say it again after the terrible start we had to 2020. The Hospice simply wouldn’t be the truly exemplar service it is without our volunteer workforce.

Just to give you an insight into our volunteer army.

We have a total number of around 360: 230 are Shop volunteers (over the 6 shops in Otago) and 130 volunteer at our North East Valley headquarters.

Our volunteers are involved in all parts of our Hospice: reception, kitchen, IPU, garden, as well as shop assistants and patient biographers. And on any given week we have 245 volunteer shifts – that’s a total of 723 volunteer hours each and every week throughout the year!

And this year, with our volunteers gone for so long over the Covid lockdown, it really brought it home how much we love having you around.

So from all of us at the Hospice, a very big and heartfelt THANK YOU to you all in this special National Volunteer Week 2020 (June 21-27). Even more relevant, given this year’s theme is ‘Te Hua o te Mahi Tahi I The benefit of working together’.

Ginny Green - CEO - Otago Community Hospice