Tēnā koutou e hoa mā,

Aotearoa has just celebrated Volunteer Week, so it seems appropriate to give a “Big Shout Out” to all our fabulous volunteers. We rely on our operational volunteers to run our organisation – the Board, administrators, finance and communications teams; and on our volunteers in the Parliamentary Watch Committee, Action Hubs and the Branches to do the advocacy mahi.

It is important that we all invest in our volunteers and be considering how we as an organisation can reward them: is it by providing mentoring, training, or experience? Or is it by providing collegiality and friendship, and/or the satisfaction of having impact in the community through our advocacy?

We should all be making it our mission to ensure that every volunteer who spends time working with us gains something that makes their lives better.

Some of the NCWNZ Volunteers in June 2023:

Congratulations to our two newest National Life Members, Jane Prichard and Christine Low. Thank you to all those who voted: members are obviously getting more used to the idea of online voting, as we reached a quorum for this vote. We will now look to arrange suitable presentations for these fabulous women, which is likely to be in conjunction with the AGM on Saturday 23 September. We are busy organising the papers for the AGM (what am I going to do without Emma, our Board administrator for the last five months?), which will have a call for nominations for the Board and for Distinguished Service Award. With our new structure of individual and organisational members, I would encourage organisational members and Action Hubs to consider whether they would like to nominate members for Distinguished Service Awards. We don’t want any of our volunteers to miss out on being recognised for their work. 

This year we will be trying a new process for supporting candidates for appointment as Aspiring Board members, the position on Board which we keep for people who have not yet had governance experience but would like to gain some. Nina Santos has ably filled this position for the last year and will be moving onto other things. Using Lotteries grant money for training that has also been used for Board training and leadership training for Branches and Action Hub volunteers, we are planning an in-person training day and Board meeting in Wellington on 12 August and inviting some of our organisational members to send an interested person to participate. After the day, those who wish to be considered for appointment can put their name forward, and the day’s activities will take the place of our usual interview process. Two places are being reserved for individual members who might like to take the opportunity for governance training – look out for the information in an NCWNZ Update email.

I look forward to the plethora of events and initiatives planned in the next couple of months by our awesome volunteers in the national, branch and Action Hub teams. Kia kaha!

à bientôt, ka kite anō, see you soon.

Suzanne

To read more articles from The Circular (May-June 2023) issue 641, click on the tag below.