Transcript

ANNA:

Well, right back at the beginning, when we first knew that we needed to raise a lot of money for the organ, the vicar called for volunteers, and I was the silly person who actually stuck my finger in the air first and said, yes, I’ll volunteer. So he said, you can chair the group. I then had to get together a group of people who were all very keen and eager and some of whom had some great abilities but hadn’t a clue what we could do to actually fundraise for the organ, so lots of ideas were thrown about.

And gradually, we got ideas that really worked. We tried some things that didn’t work so well. We tried other things that worked absolutely brilliantly. And the wonderful thing was actually nurturing the team to discover that each of them had a special something that they could offer, and they were all volunteering, and they all had something that they could give, even if it was just ideas but not the actual physical ability to carry them out. It meant that the rest of us then said, OK, so how can we do this?

And I’ve had so many wonderful volunteers in the last eight years who’ve been helping with this, and they’ve done some really brilliant things, and we’ve had all sorts of exciting things happening to help fundraise, which have got more and more people involved. And it’s had a sort of snowball effect, which I think none of us really imagined would happen at the beginning. But it’s been the most gratifying part of the whole process is to actually get the community involvement.