30 Oct Your 2024 Community Champions

Our 2024 Community Champions, joined by staff and sponsors from organisations across Torbay

What a day. A room full of winners and the opportunity to thank them and celebrate the best of the Bay’s volunteers and voluntary sector workers.

More than 100 people gathered in the Redcliffe Hotel in Paignton for the inaugural Torbay Community Champion Awards. Whether they carried off the coveted trophy in their category or not, they were all winners.

The standard was incredibly high, and the judges spent hours reading through 180 submissions before whittling them down to a maximum of four finalists in each of the nine categories.

First up was the Health and Wellbeing Champion, which had three finalists, Bryan Pitman from Brixham Rugby Club, Cycle Torbay and the Youth Mental Health Foundation and the winner was Bryan, whose work with the Looseheadz mental health health group earned him the top spot.

His citation read: “About 4 years ago, Bryan set up the Brixham Rugby Club’s Looseheadz mental health wellbeing group after a tragic incident when one of the First team players took his own life at the age of 34 because of Mental Health and other issues.

“Bryan now has a large team of volunteers that work with him from all sections from the youth to the senior teams and the wider club. He has, through educating, communicating, sharing and encouraging all players and visitors to the club to be much more open about their own mental health.

“He has inspired us all to be proactive and NOT to be ashamed of sharing how we feel.”

Second up was the Carer of the Year with a wide range of finalists from across all age groups with the finalists being Georgina Payne, Kevin Helmore and Rachel Noad, but it was Kevin who clinched it with the following citation:

“Kevin is a full-time unpaid carer, who wants to help get the voice of the Learning Disabled community heard in Torbay as well as helping to improve things for the people who are Learning Disabled.

“He helped along with other unpaid Carers with The Big Plan, he sits as the Carers Rep on The Learning Disability Partnership Board, sits on the committee of Torbay Mencap and represents them on various forums, sits on the trust’s Treat Me Well group and has for many years been a volunteer for Healthwatch. Kevin fits this in around his caring role of caring for his two severely learning disabled adult sons, one of whom has had a stroke, and both still live at home.”

The Emergency Worker of the Year was a broad category and the finalists, not necessarily who you might imagine, but we were looking for someone striving to keep their communities safe by providing emergency services, safety awareness,  and training and three people filled the bill, Jackie Williams, Angie Manning and Paul Northey and the trophy was ultimately carried off by Angie.

In the words of her nomination: “Angie supports victims of Domestic Abuse and triages them to helpful groups and services. She provides an incredible service for people in Torbay in need of guidance around a wide range of social issues, and connects individuals to the best support for them.

“Angie always centres the individual in any support she arranges and is so quick to help. She uses her expertise to support the community in a way that makes a massive difference both to services and to members of the community. We are incredibly lucky to have Angie in the Bay, and the impact she has had on the community is amazing, running What’s Your Problem and the Standing Tall Partnership, which both support incredibly vulnerable clients to connect to a wide range of groups and services.

The standard was high across the board and it was only after all nine categories were announced that the audience was asked to vote for their Community Champion of the Year, which went to Purple Angel’s Norman McNamara, who I was lucky enough to interview on my Riviera FM Volunteer Show yesterday,  but more on that and the other winners in this column next week.

In the meantime, a big thank you to all our sponsors from across the Bay, without whom none of this would have been possible. Now that we have done it once, one thing is for sure: this will become an annual event. We are already thinking bigger and better for 2025.