Timboon careers project co-ordinator wins Community award

Andrea Vallance is a dairy farmer, mum and ambulance officer, but even more important is the work she does to excite school kids about volunteerism, which makes her the worthy winner of the Community Heart Volunteer Award.

Andrea Vallance is winner of the Community Heart Volunteer Award. Picture: Dannika Bonser

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DAIRY farmer Andrea Vallance is not only an Ambulance Victoria volunteer for her Great Ocean Road town of Nirranda.

The 58-year-old mum of three is also working hard to guarantee there’s another generation of volunteers, which is why she has been honoured as winner of the Community award.

Andrea works one day a week as the co-ordinator of Timboon P-12 School’s careers project, where she has gone above and beyond her duty to get the 460 pupils engaged in volunteer work.

“We organised a showcase of all the volunteer groups in the area, the CFA, SES, Ambulance Victoria and Port Campbell Surf Lifesaving Club to explain what volunteer roles the kids could be involved in,” Andrea said.

“It’s important to get the next generation of volunteers, because the current generation is getting older and we need new ones coming through.”

Andrea said she was “raised to give back to the community” and for the past 12 years had been an Ambulance Victoria volunteer, both as a Community Emergency Response Team member at Nullawarre, and a community officer at Timboon, including driving the ambulance.

CERT teams are dotted across Victoria, acting as first responders to medical emergencies in rural areas, with early intervention for patients, arriving ahead of an ambulance.

“Our team (of eight volunteers) covers an area that is a 15km radius of Nullawarre and that means we can get to an emergency in five or 10 minutes, covering up to 100 incidents a year,” said Andrea, who works with husband Bruce milking 800 cows on 286ha.

“When I first heard about it and was asked to join I thought ‘I can’t do that’. It was a lack of confidence,” she said.

After an initial 80 hours of training, Andrea and the CERT team are able to respond to any call-out, from farm accidents to car crashes and even child birth.

“If we don’t know something, they talk us through it on the radio,” she said. “It’s better to help in some way than do nothing and I find helping people through the toughest event in their life incredibly rewarding and humbling.”

The Weekly Times Heart Volunteer Awards are supported by the Powercor Country Festival.

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