Community treasures its volunteers

LOCAL charity shops have come up with a novel way to celebrate volunteerism by organising a special treasure hunt throughout the town.

 

According to organisers, volunteers are a hidden treasure within every community to the charities and projects they help with.  The treasure hunt will take place over six days on the week beginning December 3.   Each day, a different shop in Ennis will host a clue and treasure hunters will have to visit that shop, find the answer to the clue and get a stamp or sticker from the staff to show they have been successful.  At the end of the week, filled booklets should be dropped to the last host shop, Mid-West Simon.

The idea for the novel event came from the recent announcement by Clare Volunteer Centre that International Volunteering Day takes place on December 5.

This prompted some of the local charity and thrift shops to come together with Clare Volunteer Centre to see how they might best acknowledge the support they get from the act of volunteering and highlight the importance of it to their community causes.  The charities involved are ClareCare, Enable Ireland, Mid-West Simon Community, Oxfam and the Somalia Shop.

It has been noted many times that Ennis has a number of charity and thrift shops in the town.  This may be seen as a reflection of the current economic climate but some of the shops have been part and parcel of the local community for over 20 years. Others are more recent but one thing is for certain, none would be sustainable without the support of volunteer. Certainly, it seems the consensus among the charities is that volunteers truly are a treasure.

“We prize our volunteers and hold them in the highest esteem for the generosity they have shown towards our shop, for their flair, inventiveness, skills and commitment and the enthusiastic way they give all of this to the services of our charity in Ennis,” said Carmel Keating, manager of the Mid-West Simon shop.

Supporting this, Mary Moroney pointed out that the Somalia Shop is lucky to have one of the longest-serving sets of volunteers in the town – most of them there from its inception in 1992.

In the spirit of giving back, the organisers are not charging people to participate in the event. According to Mairéad Sheedy of Oxfam, “It’s open to everybody and is purely for fun, with a small prize at the end of the week for the first three correctly completed booklets drawn from the entries.  We simply want to highlight the tremendous support we get from the local community in a lighthearted but sincere way.”  Registration books will be available in each of the shops involved and from Clare Volunteer Centre from Friday, November 23.  Clues will be read out on Clare FM’s Afternoon Show with Gavin Grace daily and can be accessed on Clare Volunteer Centre’s Facebook page each morning from 10.30am.

Sharon Meaney of Clare Volunteer Centre said, “There are so many ways to volunteer, whether you are young or old, in business, at school, unemployed or retired – everybody has something to offer the community and every community needs volunteers. For example, this project has been extremely lucky that Copystop are printing the posters and a registration booklet for us free of charge so that we can run the event.

“Clare Volunteer Centre’s host day in the Community Treasure Hunt is on International Volunteer Day, Wednesday, December 5.  To celebrate this day and all it represents, a knitted art piece called Knitting Our Community Together will be put on display in Glór, where it will remain until December 19. The art piece has been created by over 100 individual volunteers and almost 40 community and voluntary groups across the county.  We will welcome all treasure hunters at Glór on that evening to help us celebrate the huge effort.”

However, it was pointed out that volunteerism is a choice and should not be depended upon by government bodies to get essential work done by the efforts of local people alone.

Anne Loftus of ClareCare said, “It’s vital we understand and promote what volunteering is and what it is not. It is not displacing the workforce or doing things on the cheap, it is about people choosing to give their time and skills to complement and add to critical services already in place by organisations.  ClareCare  and its service users have benefitted greatly over many years from the involvement of volunteers right across Clare.”

Louise Black of Enable Ireland supported the concept of volunteering being a two-way street, “At Enable Ireland Ennis, we believe in inclusive volunteering, which means we are committed to assisting and maintaining genuine and meaningful placements for our volunteers.  As a national charity, we know our retail volunteer network is the lifeblood of our shops, delivering excellence in standards of service, customer care and fundraising.”

The organising committee are Sharon Meaney, Clare Volunteer Centre; Susan Ward, Mid-West Simon Community; Anne Loftus, ClareCare; Mairéad Sheedy, Oxfam; Louise Black, Enable Ireland and Mary Moroney, Somalia Shop.

Enquiries about the Community Treasure Hunt can be made at any of the shops involved or by contacting Sharon or Dolores on 065 6866800.