Honouring the heart of our veteran and defence community: our volunteers
National Volunteers Week is approaching soon on 19 – 25 May and is a week-long celebration held annually to recognise and thank volunteers for their contributions to communities. Volunteers play a crucial role in strengthening communities, offering their time, skills and compassion to support others.
Here at the Families of Veterans Guild, we have a community built from the years of selfless support from volunteers who are able to sacrifice their time to uplift and help war widows, defence and veteran families. Whether it be coordinating a Social Club, supporting during events, attending events on the organisations behalf, making friendship line calls, birthday calls or raising a hand to help when the occasion arises, our volunteers efforts are greatly valued.
Every day we can appreciate the help of volunteers who allow us to ensure war widows remain connected and that widows and families of veterans are seen, heard and acknowledged. For more than 80 years we have relied on the support and good work of the volunteers in our community to service thousands of war widows in NSW. Our volunteers have kept them connected, supported and included and provide them with the gift of friendship, time and support.
Our generous volunteers have had many significant achievements: they kept our organisation afloat and allowed us to expand. It all started with one war widow. One selfless woman with conviction and desire to change things: Jessie Vasey. Every day, we are grateful for her advocacy efforts and desire to help war widows. She volunteered her time and efforts to help without expecting anything in return. What began as a small group of war widows has grown into the large community it is today, demonstrating that even a small act of volunteering can evolve into something much deeper and meaningful.
To our Volunteers, we thank you. You give so much of yourselves so freely to the organisation, our cause and your peers, that ‘thank you’ doesn’t seem enough. You continue to live out the war widows motto “it is in serving each other and in sacrificing for our common good that we are finding our true life.”
