It’s National Volunteer Week (NVW)!

Giving back to our community is so very important for us and for the last couple of years we have teamed up with the incredible team at Volunteer Wellington. We decided to implement a "Day for You, Day for Us" initiative and it has been very rewarding.

For #NVW2020 we thought we would share some of the volunteer work we've done recently (including a few sneaky photos we got of the team in action).

Our recent volunteer projects have included work for Catchpool Valley and Te Omanga Hospice. We even won an award for our work gardening at the Catchpool Valley in the Remutaka Forest Park – who knew we had so many green-thumbs?

Our day at Catchpool Valley started with Peter Cooper, the coordinator of the Catchpool Restoration Project, showing us some native plants and several methods of trapping possums. We then took part in some native planting, followed by a BBQ lunch on an extensive lawn besides the clear and serene Catchpool Stream. After lunch, following a one-hour removal of gorse around the northern end of the Nga Taonga Nature Trail, a guided short loop walk ended the beautiful and stunning day.

Volunteer Wellington enabled this fabulous opportunity for us to help the restoration of our native forest, and we will be forever grateful. That next year we were awarded a Corporate Challenge Award for volunteering for “Life on Land”. Click here to read Volunteer Wellington’s 2019-20 report and you might catch us in there!

Last year we spent the day painting Te Omanga Hospice’s boundary fence. The task was simple, paint 300m worth of fence and try not to get covered in green paint….we at least got the fence finished. Craig Ell from Resene kindly donated 80L of paint and Volunteer Wellington supplied the tools. Luckily it was a beautiful day in the Hutt valley and we remembered to bring some sunscreen! A long day of painting calls for a break, so we arranged lunch to be delivered by “Eat my lunch”, which we devoured in the new facilities recently designed by CCM.

It was great to stand back and look at our work (not too closely) at the end of the day. It was a privilege to be part of the wider team of volunteers who support this wonderful organisation and we loved getting to know some of them.