The late Bessie Mary Penlington kindly left £50,000 to VAR in her Will, with no stipulations as to how it should be spent. Our Board decided to run a Community Grants Programme with the funds, particularly targeting Rotherham VCSE groups with a turnover of £25,000 or less. This collection of blog posts share the stories of some of the recipients of that funding.
Yorkshire Lowland Search and Rescue aid the Police in the search and rescue of vulnerable missing people. This could be people with dementia, vulnerable children or people who are despondent and suicidal.
I spoke to Mark Boswell, Secretary of the group, to find out a bit more about him and the cause. He tells me he has been involved for the past 5 years and found out about it via his sons who both volunteer in Wiltshire and Berkshire teams.
Most volunteers are “outdoorsy people”, sometimes with experience in the emergency services, wanting to use their expertise to support a very worthy cause. The branch is part of the wider Search and Rescue in Yorkshire; they are an official member of the Association of Lowland Rescue and part of the National Search and Rescue Framework, working alongside colleagues in Mountain Rescue, Cave Rescue, Coast Guard and the Royal National Lifeboat Association.
How well utilised are the volunteers? Well last year alone that had 34 call outs, on average two a month, but as Mark puts it, it can be “famine and feast.” Once the clocks go back, he finds this has an impact on folks with dementia and there are a lot more “wanderings” and need for their service.
Nowadays most of their biggest call outs are for young male suicides. Thinking of how difficult I would find that, I ask if he finds it a challenge; “no, but I am quite hard” he quips. I sense this hardness a reflection of his years of experience, resilience and the mindset that emergency services must have, to do what they do.
It seems to me the team really fill in a gap in emergency provision; as Mark says much of their work is simply about “finding people”, in whatever – and many times tragic - way that might be. He tells me of a recent case in Beverley where someone had been missing for two weeks; his instinct was that they were in the river and, after weeks of searching, the body was discovered in the water. “It’s not glamorous”, he says.
Glamorous it may not be, but it is clear to me that there is a deep passion for what he does and a profound sense of service to all the community.
The team, of around 30 volunteers, applied for some of the Miss Penlington Community Chest funding to cover the cost of some new specialised safety helmets. Mark explains that all volunteers are trained in licensed, Search Technician courses, “we're not amateurs beating around the woods with a stick.” They do not receive any funding from the government so rely totally on grant funding and the generosity of the general public to do this heroic work.
If you want to find out more about Yorkshire Lowland Search and Rescue and donate to their worthy cause you can do on their website. You can also follow them on their Facebook page where you can keep up to date with all their news.
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