Volunteers’ Week – Green Community Travel

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In our latest Volunteers’ Week Blog, Jenny Bright from Green Community Travel writes about how thankful they are for their volunteers:

We often say how lucky we are to have such a good group of volunteers, we often say we could not do what we do without them. This is 100% the case with Green Community Travel, our volunteer’s dedication, commitment and positive attitudes are incredible and often quite humbling.

One of our volunteers has been with us since 2001, and each year he has done over 80 trips! Every Monday and Tuesday Colin gives up whole days in order to take people to their club and day centres. Over the years this would be over 50,000 miles! It is quite incredible to give this commitment to our organisation, it helps us so much as we know the group has a regular driver that knows the passengers. The passengers are also grateful to Colin as he is when boarding the bus they are always met with a helpful, cheerful, caring driver.

One of our volunteers also works and still manages to dedicate a lot of time to us to take people to hospital appointments, on average we transport over 2 people each day to a hospital appointment. This figure doesn’t include GP surgery appointments! Without fantastic volunteers we would not be able to do this! Trevor has done over 70 trips for us in 6 months!

We have a pool of voluntary car drivers who also take a person to hospital almost every day, Bruce, Ros, Jeff, Dave, Bob, Abi, Keith, Neal and Hugh are incredible volunteers, without their support many people would not be able to access their hospital appointments in our local area. Cuts from the Government have affected local bus routes as well as the NHS Patient Transport fund, it is hard to imagine how these people would be able to get to their appointments without these caring, committed and helpful drivers.

We are also able to help local schools, scout groups and resident’s associations with affordable group transport. Each year we provide transport for a concert in our area put on by some Rotarians. All of the nursing and residential homes in the local area are invited and we transport over 70 passengers to the same destination at the same time and return them at the end of the evening! This is rewarding as some of these passengers may not have been out on an evening for a long time, one passenger’s comment of “I haven’t seen the stars for years” has really stuck with me. Again this wouldn’t be possible without our group volunteers, Brian, Colin, Dave, Sue, Barbara, Peter (x2!), Steve, Stu, Hugh and Richard.

As well as transporting people we also have some amazing volunteers on our management committee as well as in the office. Their help is much appreciated on the very busy days in the office, Andy, Shirley and Sue help us with a multitude of tasks as well as promoting our services and helping visitors in the office.

A thousand ‘thanks’ would not come close to showing how appreciative we are of our volunteers, the fact of the matter is that without them we could not do as much as we do, we would not be able to help so many people and it would impact passengers if we were only able to source paid staff. As many community transports probably know and experience the volunteers really are unsung heroes and I really want to highlight how incredible they are, 52 weeks of the year!

Do you have a story to share? Email tom@ctauk.org