In addition to the management team of four (Caryl Kinny, Mollie Striglioni, Sue Steedman and Dick Boyd), we now have a fantastic and growing team of regular volunteers – all of whom attend at least one day each week, making them very familiar to our visitors.
And whilst you may think of Our Place as a “local” organisation, we attract visitors, like our volunteers, from all over Sydney (and beyond). We have had visitors from Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Newcastle, Wollongong and rural NSW. And our volunteers come from nearly as far afield. Here is a list of the suburbs they hail from: Ashfield, Balmain, Boronia Park, Camperdown, Caringbah, Concord, Erskineville, Fairlight, Gordon, Greenacre, Killara, Lindfield, Marrickville, Naremburn, Newcastle, Newtown, Redfern, Sans Souci, Surry Hills and Sydenham.
The skills these volunteers bring to our organisation on a daily basis are invaluable. We have great cooks; qualified counsellors; a legal student; a paramedic; a registered nurse; a sitting municipal councillor; an ex-municipal councillor; an experienced mental health worker; a trained lifeline phone counsellor; a trained drug and alcohol counsellor and a social policy consultant. Put that together with the four principals who have over twenty years combined experience in the welfare sector, and various business, management and communication skills and we have a very formidable team indeed.
Of course, the greatest skill our volunteers can offer our visitors is compassion: good, kind listeners are very important, as are people who don’t judge, who enjoy a laugh, who will have a game of cards and who take everyone at face value.
"All of our volunteers care – that’s their greatest talent. It doesn’t require any special qualifications to be kind. And these people really get into your heart – so it’s not hard." (Mollie)
And we simply couldn’t operate Our Place without our volunteers.
If you think you might be interested in volunteering at Our Place, please email Mollie Striglioni at: mollie@ourplace.org.au or call 9516 1002 and leave a message. You can come and meet the team, have a chat, and see if it’s for you. We sometimes need volunteers for events or emergencies, so we don’t always need a permanent commitment.