Western Bay council staff seek volunteer project to tackle

Staff from Western Bay of Plenty District Council will be volunteering a day to complete a project to mark National Volunteer Week.

Staff from Western Bay of Plenty District Council are hoping to ice the cake of a local group or organisation.

To mark National Volunteer Week a group of staff will be rolling up its collective sleeves, getting stuck in and carrying out a project that might otherwise be tricky to complete.

A competition is being run to find a suitable project, with Socialink’s Volunteer Services acting as an independent judge of the entries.

Community outcomes adviser Liesel Carnie says while staff who co-ordinate and work with volunteers did mark volunteer day last year, things have taken a step further this year.

“We all came together [last year] because we knew volunteer week was coming up and we had all been planning to do something in our own various areas and said ‘why don’t we make it a full campaign and do something collective from council’.

She says that campaign went well and about a month ago everyone got together to talk about what could be done this year.

“We were just brainstorming and it came up that we should do a competition.”

Entries are now open and Liesel says the team is looking for projects that have the biggest impact on the community.

The winner is also likely to be a project that requires a big team to carry out the work, something that might be difficult to achieve for the winning group or organisation.

From social media posts made last week, six entries were quickly received.

“The projects that are coming through are definitely the sorts of things that would be the icing on the cake or a bit of a boost to their operation.“

Carnie says the initiative is to say thank you to volunteers who contribute to the council’s work in areas such as libraries, reserves and emergency response, but also to get council more engaged.

“[Staff] actually have a volunteer leave option in council were we can have up to a day’s leave each year to volunteer, so we thought it would be really cool to push that avenue, so that’s how the competition came about.”

Teaming up with Socialink’s Volunteer Service made sense.

“They are the lead agency in our district for it, so we thought it would be a really cool partner for our campaign so our campaign runs separately but we are quite complementary so that’s how it came about for the to judge the entry and decide where we will be put to task.”

Submit your application through: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DNZNZJH

Entries for the competition close on June 17