Youth Volunteer Awards

Thursday 5 December 2002

Volunteering is the other side of the youth picture, the side we sadly do not get to hear much about.

Not holding my breath for the day the headlines read "hordes of young people do massive good in city".

It would be great to see, all too often as I say, it's the other picture we get to hear about.

In recent years the trend here in Canterbury has been for young people to make up the majority of active volunteers working in our community.

It's one of the great secrets of our times that we have a generation of socially active and committed young people coming through. I like to think that after the encouragement of the cult of the individual in recent years, we may instead be moving into the cult of the community.

It is hugely important. In recent years I have become convinced that the only way ahead for us that will work is a way that makes it a given that we really will leave things better for the next generation than we found them.

It is going to be a move that will call for the active citizens of the future to all have a slice of the volunteer in their nature.

I find it one of the great paradoxes of our time when you can usually find the precise value of anything that it is really hard to find a hard economic total figure for the worth of goodwill.

What is accepted is that active goodwill is a multi- million dollar industry that if it stopped would soon bring the rest of society to a standstill.

I have been saying recently that society really shakes down into two broad categories.

There are the majority...the makers, and the minority...the breakers.

We are here to celebrate some of the most powerful examples of the urge to make things happen. It is always a pleasure to be amongst the generous of spirit which is what, by your actions, you have shown you are.

Today we celebrate your acts of recent volunteering commitment and also, I hate to break it to you, quite possibly catch a first public glimpse of some of the leaders of tomorrow.