After 20 years spent sitting with people doing it tough, Rosies volunteer Margaret Harvey knows the distance between having a house and needing a helping hand can be smaller than many think.
She has met people who once had businesses, jobs and families before injury, violence or hardship changed their lives, and at 85 she does not see homelessness and hardship as something that happens only to somebody else.
“I’m in my 80s now and I am so fortunate to have my own home,” she said.
“But if I didn’t have it, that could be me out on the street.
“And I would hope someone would be prepared to help me a bit.”
Ms Harvey and fellow Rosies – Friends on the Street volunteer Mavis Kuresa were recently recognised for 20 years of service in Logan and Beenleigh.
Ms Harvey was there when Rosies began its Logan outreach.
She recalled one man who lost his business and marriage after an injury and ended up living on the street, before eventually rebuilding his life and becoming a supporter of Rosies himself.
“That man didn’t want to be on the street, but he was there through circumstance,” she said.
“We see many, many people like that.”
She also remembered meeting a woman who was eight months pregnant and living in a car with her two young children, as well as a nurse who was living rough on the street, because she couldn’t pay rent.
“Those people, they don’t want their lives to go the way they’re going,” Ms Harvey said.
“They just need help and, somewhere along the way, to get things right.”
Sometimes, Ms Harvey said, the most important thing Rosies volunteers could offer was simply to sit beside someone others would not.
“Often nobody will sit with them … they feel invisible,” she said.
“But they know that we’re willing to sit with them and just listen.
“We’re not psychologists or anything. We’re ordinary people.”
When she was recently retired, after a long career working with people with disabilities, she saw a call for volunteers in her church newsletter.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that would suit me, I’d like to do that’ because I’d hope one day if my children were in that position, somebody’d want to help them,” she said.
“So of course I was 65, so they turned me down.”
Three months later, the advertisement appeared again and she decided to have another try.
“I thought, ‘Oh well, they didn’t get what they wanted the first time. I’ll give it another go’,” she said.
Within months, she became Rosies’ first Logan branch coordinator and over the next two decades met people whose lives had changed with little warning.
Mavis was among the volunteers Ms Harvey trained in the early years.
“We’ve seen others come and go, but Mavis is still right there giving her time out on the street,” Ms Harvey said.
“Twenty years later, here she is still with me.”
Ms Harvey no longer belongs to a regular outreach team, but still fills in when needed.
Two decades after Rosies began its work in Logan, she is still there to sit and listen to anyone who feels invisible.
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