A love for volunteering in Selwyn

From 16-22 June, National Volunteer Week celebrates the collective contribution of the millions of volunteers who enrich Aotearoa New Zealand.

In Selwyn, we have over 240 Civil Defence community volunteers split across 30 teams, an Emergency Support Team of 26 volunteers and a Response Team (NZRT21) of 35 volunteers.

During emergency events, our Civil Defence community volunteers also known as Community Response Team (CRT), check on their local community, set up a Community Response Hub if needed and provide vital information to the Selwyn Emergency Management Team.

Our Selwyn Emergency Support Team (SEST) are trained and resourced to open a Civil Defence Centre, conduct welfare needs assessments and perform other general welfare taskings.

Our Selwyn Response Team (NZRT21) are a nationally accredited team that can provide light rescue, cordon and traffic management, reconnaissance and perform other general taskings.

One of our longstanding Civil Defence community volunteers (CRT), Lois Thomas was recently a winner of the Neighbourhood Support NZ’s Celebrating Volunteers award.

Lois has been a volunteer for the last 10 years and is very active in supporting her community. She has helped open and run evacuation centres for people impacted by flooding and wildfires.

Lois says she was very humbled and honoured to be nominated, because she’s just one of the many volunteers in Selwyn’s Civil Defence community team and across the district.

“Volunteering is something I just love doing, I love giving back to the community. The Selwyn community as a whole thrives on the work of many volunteers, from sports groups, through to many other community organisations, they all help to hold the community together.”

She recently came up with an initiative to promote Selwyn Gets Ready by holding Saturday morning events outside The Lincoln Pantry and Coffee Culture.

She arranged for the coffee businesses to sponsor this and offer half price coffees to every new household who signs up.

Selwyn Gets Ready is a free Civil Defence alerting system offered by the Council, which sends texts and email alerts to subscribed households in the event of an emergency. You can sign up at selwyn.getsready.net

After running this event over two consecutive Saturday mornings, over 50 new households have signed up to Selwyn Gets Ready.