Volunteering

HaydenWhy do I volunteer? Well, it’s a sad story, so please have a box of tissues handy. LOL not really but it could be.

I have worked my whole life caught up in the materialistic commercialism world of having to buy everything because some lady on the TV tells me that my life won’t be complete without it. So I was working for a major company in Morwell and had just organised to relocate from Drouin to Churchill to save some money on travelling when we got told that the company was closing the doors on our site.

I felt like I had just been knocked out by Mike Tyson (except I still had both my ears intact). We decided to make the move to Churchill and we were going to use the redundancy money to pay off our debt and start fresh. Sounds great, right? But my life has a way of not going to plan.

We got a call from my mother-in-law who lives in Scotland and found out that she had been diagnosed with cancer. Instead of using the money to rid ourselves of debt we made the decision to send my wife and son to Scotland for 3 months to access the situation and help out with things. I also went over to Scotland for one month to show support and see the family.

While my wife was in Scotland I applied for a Newstart Allowance and was the first person they can recall that had a waiting period waived due to financial hardship. While I was overseas, my Newstart was cut off and the money dried up.

When we got back, Centrelink wouldn’t start my wife’s payments and I was suddenly faced with the situation where I couldn’t afford to put food on the table for my family. This was all around Christmas time — we had no money, so we made the decision to go and visit the Salvation Army to see about food packs for our family. They were amazing and really helped us out. They also asked if we had anything for my son for Christmas and we didn’t, so they actually gave us gifts for my son for Christmas and that really made our day.

A couple of our friends, who were in nearly the same situation, came around to our house with food baskets for us and this was a turning point. Seeing the generosity of our friends when we had nothing and also the generosity of the public for donating food and gifts really paved the way for me to start volunteering and giving something back.

I started small with volunteering at Federation Training helping English as a Second Language students in a computer class for two hours a week. Then we were placed with the opportunity to take over a Facebook cooperative group to help buy organic foods and wholesale prices. We started with 40 Facebook members and grew that to over 500 in 3 months.

Our orders have grown to the point where we get a rebate and with that are able to donate organic vegetables every week to the local church, who distributes them to families in need. This makes all the hours’ worth it knowing that we can help another family that might be in the same situation as us and that they know that there are people in the world who still care.

– Hayden

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