A validation of volunteering
A lifetime of experience has gone into a book that aims to advise and highlight the importance of volunteers.
Ron and Ngaire Rowe, both 81, have been volunteering for more than 50 years and have combined years of experience, real-life accounts and research to write Empowering Volunteers and Those Who Lead.
New Zealand has more than 1.2 million volunteers in 115,000 voluntary organisations and 27,000 charitable organisations.
‘‘We are a nation of volunteers, we really are. Society would fall apart without volunteering,’’ Ron Rowe said.
Over the past few decades Ron Rowe has been delivering speeches and workshops on volunteerng across New Zealand and Australia for the Lions Club and Ministry of Social Development to encourage and inspire others.
‘‘Over the years people have asked me to write a book about my seminar work.’’
Ron Rowe said he was talking to staff at Volunteering NZ about the need for a resource for volunteers and was finally convinced to write a book.
For two to three months during the level 4 lockdown, Ron Rowe went through all of his information, updated it and collated it, turning it into a 172-pagework.
He said volunteering enhanced people’s self-worth and self-esteem, and New Zealand relied on it.
‘‘People that we have worked with have grown.
Those people who didn’t think they had it in then. We have seen that with Covid-19 and the team of five million.’’
Ron Rowe left the navy in 1966 and was concerned about what his future would look like.
A butcher told him that he would make a great Lions Club member and, two years later, he joined the East Coast Bays Lions Club in Auckland.
Ron Rowe said a volunteering highlight was opening the first Lions Club office in New Zealand, in Wellington in 1976.
Ron and Ngaire Rowe were in Papua New Guinea with Volunteer Service Abroad when he was an adviser to a tertiary business college and to the provincial government from 2008 to 2010.
In 2017, the couple won Queen’s Service Medals for service to the community.
People can buy Empowering Volunteers and Those Who Lead at Bruce Mckenzie Booksellers or from Volunteering Manawatu¯. Profits will go to Volunteering NZ and the Centenary Legacy Trust.
‘‘We are a nation of volunteers, we really are. Society would fall apart without volunteering.’’
Ron Rowe