Wendy Hunt might have started volunteering because she got “roped into it” back in 1983, but she has continued doing it ever since because she believes a little effort can bring life-changing results to others.

“Help is relatively easily given and yet it can make such an enormous difference,” she said.

One of eight working volunteers at the struggling GV Pregnancy and Family Support Service in Shepparton, Wendy said she’d always felt empathy for the service’s clients who’d had to put pride aside and admit they couldn’t manage without help.

Now, her team is asking for help of its own.

“I always used to feel for clients who came in because it must make you feel bad having to publicly say, ‘I need help’,” she said.

“And now I’m going to have to ask people for help, I’m relating to our clients even more.

“It’s horrible having to ask, but I think it’s worth it if we can hang in there.”

In its 49 years of operation, the service, which now falls under the Caroline Chisholm Society umbrella, hasn’t asked the public for financial help.

It provides parenting support and material aid for anyone who rings the doorbell at its St Andrews Rd location free of charge, no questions asked.

If $100,000 can’t be raised by the end of this year, the service will close.

“We got to a similar stage to where we are now around 2007 and we’d got down to the last day,” Wendy said.

“We’d given away the furniture, and Caroline Chisholm (Society) invited us to come under their umbrella on the proviso that somebody from here went on their board.

“So I did that for 16 years.”

During her 41 years of volunteer service, Wendy’s required level of commitment has ebbed and flowed.

In 1983, she was teaching at a school in Mooroopna North.

Pat Coffey, who started the volunteering service, told Wendy that GV Pregnancy and Family Support Service had clients in that area and asked her to deliver items to them on her way to work.

Wendy said it was one of those jobs that was tricky to give up once she’d started, and of course, with a family of her own — she is a mother to three and grandmother to four — and an employment stint in New York after retiring, life was busy enough.

She was motivated to continue helping to provide the service, however, by seeing the very human struggle within the community.

“If you can’t feed the child and you can’t dress the child, then the child goes into care and we all know that’s to be avoided at all costs,” Wendy said.

“If you can help people get their act together relatively easily it would be awful not to do it, wouldn’t it?”

Wendy volunteers every Wednesday morning for a couple of hours.

“It’s pretty low-key because we just mostly sort baby clothes. It’s pretty easy,” she said.

Wendy said the offerings had changed with the introduction of different insurance, health and safety requirements through the decades, but the material aid had been a constant.

As for the parenting support side of things, pregnancy and parenting practitioner Natalie Connally said that in the past three years, 55 women had been supported with 200 hours of case management each.

“We started out supporting women and babies and it’s turned into supporting families who’ve got a child between nought and six, and some of them are grandparents,” Wendy said.

Wendy said while grants had funded much of their service over the past half-century, they were hard to come by for ongoing work, as often they were given for specific one-off projects.

“Really what we want is help for our ongoing costs because our volunteers do the grunt work, we don’t need staff for the grunt work, our volunteers do that,” she said.

“It will be really sad to see it close.

“There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears that’s gone into 49 years, it would be nice to see 50.”

Volunteers will again offer a Christmas gift-wrapping stall to raise funds this year and are looking forward to people stopping by their table to tell stories of the help they received from the service when the teenagers beside them were babies.

∎ Donations to help save GV Pregnancy and Family Support Service can be made here.

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Wednesday, 7th February 2024

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