Anne Pridham, Easy Care Gardening Team Leader

What you do/who you help

Easy Care Gardening is a gardening service for the frail aged and people with a disability on a pension. Teams of volunteer gardeners weed, prune, mulch and make gardens safe and tidy and “easy care” so that these people are able to remain in their own homes. Anne Pridham is a Team Leader and works every Saturday.

What inspired you to get involved in your organisation?

Anne Pridham, one of nine team leaders with Easy Care Gardening Inc, came into her voluntary role by accident. Five years ago Anne’s daughter Francesca decided to take up horticulture at TAFE as she had an interest in gardening. At around the same time Anne saw an advert in the local newspaper for Easy Care Gardening volunteers. Anne decided it was something she and her daughter could both do on a Saturday, as she would already be committed to driving Francesca to the garden each week.

Anne is a lawyer and works full time during the week. Today her Saturday work with Easy Care Gardening plays a large part in her life and over the years she has built up an in-depth knowledge of gardening for people who largely can’t do the job themselves. “I absolutely love it,” she said.

Your responsibilities:

Anne organises the team of volunteers and liaises between the team and the client. “The Saturday team is special because every member has given up part of their precious weekends to do the voluntary work, as all either work or study and attend classes during the week,” Anne said. “The Saturday team has a younger average age than the other Easy Care Gardening teams and the clients love having young people around and the younger volunteers seem interested in what the ‘seniors’ do and say,“ she said

The social aspect of the work is very important. “Many clients do not have visitors call around, have no family, so the team fills a social ‘gap’ in the clients’ lives,” explains Anne.

When asked if there was a danger that there will be too much socialising and not enough work, Anne laughs. “I have the answer to that one” says Anne. :”If they don’t have a sweat on then they (the team members) don’t get any morning tea!”

Your greatest challenges:

Finding new volunteers to meet an increasing call for service is always a challenge. Keeping volunteers isn’t a problem. “Team members are relatively consistent in their individual commitments to volunteering. They obviously like being part of a very energetic, ‘can do’ team, otherwise they wouldn’t keep coming back for more”.

How have you utilised goodcompany?

The Easy Care Gardening office has had great success. A marketing expert spent a lot of time looking at the organisation and formulating a marketing strategy and plan for the future.

An emergency call to goodcompany for help when the Easy Care Gardening website was branded as potentially dangerous by search engines was fixed by an IT expert who worked remotely from his desk in another city. We are very grateful for the expert help offered to us by goodcompany volunteers.