Twenty Years of SupportLink Friendship

Colin Gerken’s face lights up when he sees Robyn Willett enter the room on a Wednesday morning.

She heads over, gives him a hug and along with Colin’s wife Betty, they chat away about the week before starting a game of cards.

Wednesdays have been this way for the past 20 years. They are old friends catching up – although the friendship had a slightly different start to most.

At just 59 Colin had a stroke that left him unable to speak and with partially limited mobility. Betty can’t remember how she got on to SupportLink – a service run by Enliven that matches volunteers with generally elderly members of the community – but 20 years later she’s still thankful she did.

Robyn had retired from her job and wanted to do something good for the community. She signed up as a SupportLink volunteer, thinking she would get matched with “a little old lady who I could help with her groceries”. What transpired was very different but also very special.

“I was a bit unsure at the start – I had no experience with anyone who had had a stroke, apart from my mother-in-law, but they gave me some training and we thought we’d give it a couple of months,” she said.
“Well, they haven’t got rid of me yet!”

Robyn is SupportLink’s longest-serving volunteer, although she thinks of the arrangement much more as a friendship than a client-volunteer relationship.

For her, the friendship has been a blessing.

“Coming here has made me a better person. I used to be so impatient, so intolerant, but now I think outside the square and appreciate better that everyone is different,” she says.

For Betty, it’s a little bit of time in the week where she can slightly step back from caring for Colin 24/7, and she thoroughly enjoys joining in with the cards.

And for Colin, he enjoys the regular catch ups, the competitive cards, which he wins occasionally, and the happiness Robyn brings when she simply walks in the door.