King's award for Voluntary Service - Chesterfield - video Dailymotion

King's award for Voluntary Service awarded to Chesterfield and North Derbyshire Volunteer Centre.

Transcript

00:00 can tell me a bit about the charity and the award? Okay so I'm Dave Bradford, I'm CEO of the

00:05 Volunteer Centre here in Chesterfield. We cover Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire.

00:09 We've been here, the Volunteer Centre's been here for 25 years now, or just over 25 years,

00:16 we celebrated that in 2021. Last year we were nominated for the King's Award for the

00:25 work we did during the pandemic, or primarily for the work we did during the pandemic, which was to

00:30 provide a shopping service for people that were on the shielded list and socially isolating.

00:38 And during that period we delivered over 5,000 shops and prescription pickups,

00:46 which was more than anybody else in the county had done. I mean we were rightly proud of that

00:53 amount of work, but then to be nominated was the icing on the cake really. We had, there was several

01:02 hoops to jump through, we did a couple of interviews and then a presentation in Derby,

01:08 so it wasn't straightforward, nobody gives you this on a plate, you have to show that you're

01:13 deserving of it. And we found out last month that we'd been granted the award and obviously

01:20 very proud, we've had to sit on it, keep our mouths shut for a little bit, but it's well worth

01:26 it. It'll raise our profile and gets the name out there a little bit and also highlights the

01:33 fantastic work that volunteers do, because that's what we're here for and it's for them, it's not

01:37 just for us, it's for the volunteers, they're the people that made this happen. Well we primarily

01:44 provide a brokerage service, which is trying to get people into voluntary work and pointing them

01:50 in the right direction, but as I say, during Covid that wasn't happening because there were no

01:55 organisations to put them into, they'd all stopped more or less, but people still needed

02:02 shopping and we were asked by Public Health to do that, so we had no hesitation in saying yes.

02:09 We worked all the way through, we worked all the way through Covid, all our volunteers were happy

02:16 to do that and they put their lives at risk day after day, going out and doing shops for people.

02:23 It was tremendous to see, it was quite humbling really.