Heartfelt Thanks to 360 Hospice Volunteers During National Volunteer Week

The Hospice has to raise $2.5 million each year to maintain its service across Otago – ensuring that anyone needing specialist palliative care gets that care no matter where they live, no matter what illness they have, no matter what their age.

Our volunteers are a crucial part of the Hospice service puzzle. On any given week, we have 245 volunteers helping us out, with an incredible 723 work hours undertaken. That’s a further $700,000 worth of input each year from our volunteers that enables us to do what we do.

Our Inpatient Unit relies on dozens of volunteer receptionists – from 5 to 7pm each week night and 9am to 6pm in the weekend - who steer people in the right direction, ensure phone calls end up in the right hands, and present a warm and generous presence as people enter our Hospice. Our shop managers depend upon hundreds of volunteers who keep the engine rooms of our seven crucial fundraising Hospice Shops stoked. Our beautiful gardens would be nothing without the continuous care and attention lavished on them by our committed gardeners. Our kitchen only works because of the crew of volunteers who turn up week after week, doing their shift with a smile and professionalism. And then there is our band of housekeepers keeping order during the weekends; biographers, creating stories out of lives well lived; the maintenance crew, the administrators who help us with our art register, our databases and anything else that needs a tidy up; and the hundreds of volunteers who turn up rain or shine during our Appeal Day and for the annual trailer raffle.

From all at the Hospice, a heartfelt thank you to our wonderful volunteers!