We don’t love reducing a year of actual people doing actual work down to a handful of numbers — but the numbers are still worth sharing, because they’re the clearest way to show what all those Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings added up to. Across our four programs, volunteers logged just over fourteen thousand hours
Marta Ilić has driven the Tuesday night food relief run for two years. In that time she’s missed exactly one shift — for her own knee surgery — and arranged her own replacement before she told anyone she’d be out. “I started because a neighbour asked if I had a car and two free hours,”
After last year’s flooding, more than one of our regular volunteers said the same thing afterward: everyone wanted to help, but nobody knew who to call, what to bring, or where to actually go. We spent the following months building something to fix that. The new Emergency Support Crew is a standing group of trained
We matched our first twelve mentoring pairs back in November, mostly volunteers with a spare afternoon a fortnight and a willingness to just turn up consistently. Six months in, ten of those twelve pairs are still meeting regularly, which is a better hit rate than we expected for a program built from scratch. The thing
When the food relief network started, it was three people, one borrowed van, and a handshake deal with a single bakery willing to hand over the bread it couldn’t sell. Two years on, that same network now works with eleven local businesses and moves surplus food to families across the district most nights of the
Six local crews. One Saturday. Four creek lines that hadn’t seen a proper clean-up in years. That was the plan for our first joint clean-up weekend, and by Saturday afternoon it had turned into something bigger than any of us expected. Volunteers from the Ashfield, Riverside, Northgate and Millbrook crews split into teams and worked
