Spare a thought …. and maybe a pound or 2 to help us help others …..
It’s National Volunteers week folks; in a world seemingly full of chaos, greed and hate, it’s heart-warming to think that there are tens-of-thousands, millions even, of people who give up their free time to help others. With no expectation of recognition, reward or recompense, and often at considerable personal and financial cost, these good people do this for no other reason than to help someone else. In the UK were blessed with so many voluntary organisations it would take many hours just to list them all.
Unsurprisingly, we’re focusing on Mountain Rescue: this service is provided free of charge by unpaid volunteers who give up their free time to turn out, day or night, sunshine or hail, even on Christmas Day and New Years Day; who put time in to training and fund-raising as there’s no Government funding.
Unpaid volunteers working alongside the salaried statutory service personnel and it’s not all mountains – Mountain Rescue teams have been involved in the Lockerbie Air Crash, the search for April Jones, the 2015 floods, are regularly called to help search for missing persons or to assist the ambulance service access patients in difficult locations. Hills, valleys, towns, rivers and lakes – MR teams may find themselves operating in any of these environments. Even if you never set foot on a hill or mountain, MR may, one day, come to the aid of you or your family
Here are some stats from Mountain Rescue England and Wales:
– There were only 9 days in 2017 without a mountain rescue callout in England and Wales (and that’s not counting Scotland and N Ireland)
– There were 2,396 callouts from 35 statutory agencies of which 2,110 resulted in a Mountain Rescue deployment
– 1,722 persons were assisted, utilising 97,208 volunteeer hours (NOT including training and admin time. At UK minimum wage rate, that’s £798,000 saved by local emergency services and the Government).
So please spare a thought, and maybe a pound or two, for your local Mountain Rescue team. We couldn’t do it without your support.
If you’d like to contribute to Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team Plymouth annual running costs of around £30K, you can do so by following this link…. https://bit.ly/2IibGu6 or simply click the donate button below.
