Fundraising champion Irene Kayler-Thomson may have helped raise more than $200,000 for Sunshine Hospital over the past 25 years, but it’s the priceless moments of her day-to-day encounters that keep her rocking up daily as a volunteer.
A former president and secretary and still devoted member of the Sunshine Hospital Auxiliary, Irene says it’s the comfort she can give patients and their loved ones that provides the biggest motivation.
On the day that Star Weekly met with this dynamo for a chat, a colleague from the auxiliary had died. Irene had spent the morning comforting friends, just as she does with patients and their families.
“They’re down, they’re worried, they’re upset, they may have just heard something [bad],” she says of the patients she meets.
“I’m a stranger and they can tell me things, at that particular moment, they might not be able to tell a friend or a relative. I can give a bit of comfort. It’s about human contact.”
Irene came to Sunshine in 1956 and is proud to say she’s worked for more than five decades without a cent going into her own pocket. She gave up her job as an office worker to have children and says her husband was proud that she would never have to work again.
Irene’s charity work began when a man knocked on her door – her son was not yet a year old – asking for help to raise money for a local kindergarten. There was only one in Sunshine at the time, so Irene agreed to help by making cakes.
“My son is now 57 (I hate saying that), and I’ve never stopped working for charity since,” she says. “It went from the kindergarten to schools to Girl Guides to Scouts and onwards, finishing up with the Sunshine Hospital.”
Her involvement with the hospital began in 1990 when bad weather caused a fete for a local multiple sclerosis centre to be cancelled. Armed with a heap of goods that needed a home, Irene thought about what to do with it. “The hospital was in the process of starting … so we went across and asked if we could have a stall at the front and whatever money we made we would put into a hospital account.”
The hospital banked “the princely sum of $311” as the hospital auxiliary started with its first two members. That figure would eventually skyrocket to $40,000 in a single year, the money going to a special-care nursery.
Irene says she’s always knitting or sewing something. “It’s our hospital, it’s grown literally from nothing.”
