For the first time since hosting corporate volunteers at CERES, two people – Marta and Jon from NAB, volunteered on two consecutive weeks.

‘We wanted to use our two volunteer days this year as an opportunity for our team to get together and do something useful for the community’, says Marta. ‘We thought that it would be good to get our hands (and feet and everything else) a bit dirty in taking on a couple of projects for CERES.’

Marta and Jon were the only members of their team who were available for the two days, though on each occasion they also had two or three other members of their team join them. Here is what Marta had to say about their experience:

“On both days we worked with other NAB staff from a variety of locations – call centre, broker to name a few, and it was a great opportunity to meet and chat with people from other parts of NAB.

On the first day, after a tour of CERES, Martin, the construction manager of CERES, took us to one of the many chicken runs, where we built a new red gum retaining wall.  It was great to collaborate as a team to build something that is going to be useful.  We had fun and soon built a great friendship with the many chickens who loved us unearthing zillions of juicy worms for them as we dug!

A week later we returned, and with another group of NAB volunteers we did some further clearing up of the chicken run and then built a long crushed rock and rubble wheelchair slope into one of the classrooms, making it much more serviceable for disabled visitors.  This task involved shifting several meters of crushed rock and bluestone blocks and so at the end of both days we certainly knew we had exercised muscles we hadn’t used in a while, but were pleased to have been able to assist the community in some way.

Neither of us knew anything about CERES but quickly learnt that it has been in place for some 30 years and provides a great opportunity for the community to learn about living sustainably. We were very pleased to be able to spend both our days working at CERES.