Chairman's Address at Queen's Award for Voluntary Service ceremony

Ladies and gentlemen it gives me great please to welcome Georgiana Osborne tonight as our special guest. As Lord Lieutenant she will be presenting HOPE with the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service. It is a great honour and a great pleasure for all of us involved with HOPE to receive this public recognition of our voluntary work.

Tonight we have invited people who have at various times, both past and present, been involved with volunteering their time and talents to HOPE. It is great to see so many of you here in this wonderful setting.

Hospitalfield House is the appropriate place for this ceremony to take place, for it was in the room next to the Picture Gallery that the early planning meetings were held. I would like to thank Mr Payne and the Trustees of the Patrick Allan-Fraser of Hospitalfield Trust for their support in providing HOPE with the land, equipment and even water supply in the early days when we started working on the site in 1994. The land on which the Organic Garden has developed has always been provided rent free and I would like to acknowledge this generosity publicly.

In the beginning HOPE was totally reliant on volunteers to make the project work. We had expected that we would attract retired people with an interest in and knowledge of gardening. In fact we had a series of young people who were unemployed. These young people were obliged to take on paid work when it became available and so had to move on from the Garden.

One of these early volunteers was Mark Barthorpe. He showed tremendous commitment to HOPE and would spend hours after work and at the weekends trying to keep up with all the gardening tasks. Once we were able to pay Mark a small wage, the Garden started to function more effectively. Mark was our Gardener from 1995 until his tragic death in 2000. Without his dedication the project would have failed

Volunteers are involved in all kinds of ways. There are the actual gardeners who come into the garden and support the staff directly. This can mean one to one interaction with the trainees, making sure that tasks are done properly and safely. Others deliver vegetable boxes to customers in Arbroath and the nearby Angus towns from June through to October each year. We also have drivers who will deliver trainees to social events such as the summer outing, the BBQ or the Christmas disco.

Other volunteers will help us at the regular fund raising events. Our committee of management, our directors and our office bearers are also all volunteers. What would we do without you all?

So I would like to thank all of you for your support over the past 13 years. During that time the garden has grown from strength to strength. We now have about 25 trainees, all adults with learning disabilities, who come to the Garden on a regular basis. The HOPE Garden feels a very special place. There is always change in a garden throughout the year and from year to year.

HOPE's place in the local community has grown more substantially over the years. Gradually more and more of the public have visited the Garden. Last year we were chosen as the site for the launch of a Scottish Map of Community Gardens.

Thank you to all of you who are here tonight. Your combined volunteering activities have made HOPE a most successful project.

Cedric de Voil
29th August 2007