Volunteer Awareness Week

Volunteers provider a professional education environment for children and parents at Playcentre

One of New Zealand's foremost early childhood education services continues to provide a high quality learning environment with a strong volunteer ethos after seventy years.

The New Zealand Playcentre Federation is proud to celebrate its 11,000 volunteers, who run nearly 500 centres for young children and their families all around the country.

“Playcentre stands for the fact that many of the most important activities in life do not attract a salary,” said Federation Co-president Maureen Woodhams. “Raising happy, resilient children, passing on your values to the next generation, and building strong communities. These things keep our society humming along, and Playcentre supports parents to do all of them.”

Playcentres provide high quality early childhood education for over 15,000 children and their parents. Playcentre acknowledges and supports parents as the first and most important teachers of their children, and recognises that children reach their full potential when parents and whānau understand their development and take part in the learning process.

“Nationally, Playcentre works on a voluntary system” said Federation Co-president Marion Pilkington. “In a 2004 study, looking at Value Added by Voluntary Agencies (the 'VAVA report'), Playcentre volunteers' work hours equated to over 1170 full time equivalent paid staff. This is equal to the top 1% of profit making companies such as Telecom. Our members do an amazing job – they are to be congratulated!”

Parents are provided with early childhood and management education and support through Playcentres’ NZQA-accredited diploma in early childhood and adult education. This enables them to extend their skills and make a positive, professional contribution to the high quality early childhood education provided in the Playcentres.

“The Playcentre Education programme is about growing as a person, a parent and an educator” said Maureen Woodhams. “It is built on the Māori concept of ‘ako’, where the former learners then volunteer as teachers to support those who are new to Playcentre education.”

Playcentre has a philosophy of supporting emergent leadership, which enables many parents to gain new skills, and the confidence to try new things and develop new career directions. Along the way they also gained free education, empowerment, encouragement and support for life-long learning, and the satisfaction of seeing and supporting children learning and growing.

“Parenting is the most important job any person will do in their life” said Marion Pilkington. “Playcentre provides a community network, plus free parent education, to help parents do this job as well as they can. We put our resources into building families, who then move out and strengthen their communities.” This can be seen in the number of Playcentre members who go on to be on school boards of trustees, who continue work in other community organisations, and who go on to do further training.

Volunteer Awareness Week, which is 19-25 June this year, provides New Zealanders with a chance to acknowledge the excellent work done by our many volunteers and discover opportunities to get involved in their communities. Find out more about Playcentre, or contact your local centre, by visiting www.playcentre.org.nz.

ENDS

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