PHOTO: Volunteers are a vital part of our community, including the Cobar CWA who recently held this raffle.
In the past week, it’s likely many western plains residents conducted volunteer work for the community and fittingly did so during National Volunteer Week which ended on May 26th.
It will come as no surprise that to locals that according to the ‘Heartbeat of Rural Australia Research Study’ by the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR), over half of all community organisations in regional, remote, and rural Australia employ no paid staff and are run primarily by volunteers.
Quite simply, many community groups could not survive without these wonderful people even more so in this challenging economic climate where costs, such as fuel and travel, are a burden on the volunteer.
In fact, a quarter (26%) of young people say they don’t volunteer due to financial reasons, while just over half (54%) of volunteers say they’ve incurred out-of-pocket expenses from volunteering…