I’d like to nominate Kim Batty, the single mother who co-founded the amazing Hastings Emergency Action Reslience Team (HEART) in the historic UK town of Hastings. It touched a nerve locally and saw over 1000 volunteers step up to help people in the town cope with the imnpacts of COVID-19 with food shopping, deliveries, driving keyworkers to NHS hospitals (frree of charge), collecting medications – even dog-walking! Organising all this has been a super-human teamwork effort but eKi has been there every step of the way, writing volunteer guidelines, designing websites, helping develop databases (all with the help of Nationbuilder!) and much, much more.


HEART is still very much going and is now developing into a permanent, flexible volunteer workforce supporting a host of different charity and voluntary organisations with their work across our town, keeping opur community safe and healthy and spirits as high as can be expected.


It’s working, too! Hastings has one of the lowest incidence rates for Coronavirus in the UK and research is showing that an important aspect of that has been the scale and efficacy of the volunteer response which has enabled people here to observe the lockdown rules while still keeping things going, staying safe and looking after their neighbours.


So go Kim! She’s a wonder, and would thoroughly deserve some recognition for all her hard work.