Volunteer Award for David Black

Some great news to help kick off #VolunteersWeek our friends over at The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety have named our cook, fitness guru and all round great guy David Black, their ‘Volunteer of the Year’ for 2021!

As our regular followers, customers and Centre users will know, David has been with the Centre for a very long time and dutifully comes in each day to make his speciality soups. A few years ago his interest in martial arts led him to start volunteering with The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety, to try and pass on his skills to other blind, partially sighted, deaf and hard of hearing people. The courses he has run at FVSC as a result have been very popular indeed.

Over the last year, he has been delivering weekly ‘Bitesized Fitness’ classes online for everyone to enjoy and this is one of the reasons this award has been made.

Alan Bell, Founder, The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety said:

We have all been so impressed with the sheer amount of work David has put in to keeping people happy and healthy over the last year. When people needed a light in the darkness, David was there. It is not just the quantity either, weekly videos mean a lot of work, but the quality is also excellent. It is clear David has put so much thought into these sessions that even if we were not in the grips of a pandemic, our award committee were adamant that David would still be the winner!

“Like many charity organisations we rely heavily on our volunteers and we started this award to recognise their contribution not only to our work but, as part of Volunteer’s Week, the Third Sector in Scotland in general. On that note, I would also like to pass on our thanks to Forth Valley Sensory Centre for making, editing and hosting the videos as well as putting on our classes outside of the pandemic!”

Forth Valley Sensory Centre Chief Executive, Jacquie Winning added:

“What a wonderful achievement for David. It is great to have his hard work recognised in this way and thank you to Alan for taking the time out to make the presentation personally. I have very much enjoyed David’s fitness classes, online and in person so I would recommend them to anyone.”