Volunteer programme wins award

We were delighted to attend the Volunteer Centre Kensington & Chelsea annual Awards Ceremony on Friday 8th June and pleased to be joined by two of our volunteers, Mary and Eleanor.

We nominated four of our fantastic volunteers in Kensington & Chelsea to be recognised at the event, to celebrate and acknowledge the incredible contribution that they make each week as volunteer befrienders or shop assistants. Mary and Eleanor were presented with certificates by The Mayor, Councillor Christopher Buckmaster and we have certificates for Geraldine and Milton who were unable to attend.

We had a fantastic afternoon and it was great to learn more about other voluntary and charitable organisations in the borough, most of all, we were delighted to be awarded the Good Practice Award 2012 in recognition of our innovative good practice. 

Our volunteers are crucial to the work of the Octavia Foundation and in the past year we have doubled the number of volunteers to 167. The Octavia Foundation is an organisation built on an innovative history of volunteering. Our namesake, the social reformer Octavia Hill, who died one hundred years ago this year, was a passionate advocate and proponent of volunteering, mobilising the resources and skills of her friends and contacts over 150 years ago to support and develop her work with housing, social work and education in Kensington and Chelsea and the surrounding boroughs in the late part of the 19^th century.

In 2012, as we recognise and celebrate the legacy of Octavia in this centenary year, we are proud and committed to developing and promoting the value of volunteering to local people and to creating interesting, inspiring and invigorating volunteer opportunities that are as rewarding for the volunteer as they are for the beneficiaries of their support and broader beneficiaries of our work.