Celebrating Laurie’s 8 Years with Age UK Isle of Wight

An Insight into 8 Years of Supporting Age UK Isle of Wight Behind the Scenes

Today, we’re celebrating Laurie’s 8 years with Age UK Isle of Wight. During that time, she has worked across several areas of the charity and played an incredibly important role behind the scenes, supporting our teams, services and the wider organisation.

Laurie first joined Age UK Isle of Wight working on the Age Friendly Island Project, an initiative focused on influencing the way organisations and businesses across the Isle of Wight worked to better meet the needs of older people.

As part of the project, Laurie worked with a wide range of local partners, including Southern Vectis and Vectis Radio, and helped to deliver Age Friendly Training to organisations across the Island.

Over the years, Laurie’s role has changed alongside the charity.

During the Covid pandemic, Laurie provided support to our Chief Officer and Board of Trustees at a challenging and rapidly changing time for the organisation.

Today, as our Resources Officer, Laurie works across the charity to make sure our teams have the infrastructure, processes and support they need to deliver services effectively.

Her role covers areas including quality, training, health and safety, resources, policies and procedures, as well as providing ongoing support to our Chief Officer.

Laurie said:

“Some of these are perhaps the less exciting areas of the business, but they are important to ensure we remain compliant.”

An important part of Laurie’s work is liaising with Age UK nationally on the charity’s quality requirements, including our three-yearly Charity Quality Standards audit.

The audit looks across all areas of Age UK Isle of Wight, reviewing everything from documentation, policies and procedures to how our services operate in practice. It helps to ensure the charity continues to work to the standards expected across the Age UK network.

While much of Laurie’s work happens behind the scenes, it helps make our frontline services possible.

For Laurie, one of the most rewarding parts of her role is knowing that the work she does enables colleagues across Age UK Isle of Wight to concentrate on supporting older people.

“My favourite part of my role is supporting and enabling my colleagues to be able to deliver our frontline services and support older Island residents.”

Whether it is making sure staff have access to the right training, keeping policies and procedures up to date, supporting quality standards or helping our internal systems run effectively, Laurie’s work touches so many different parts of the charity.

As Age UK Isle of Wight continues to develop, Laurie is also looking ahead to how the charity can improve the way it works while creating more opportunities to support older Islanders.

“I look forward to new opportunities to grow our services and charity whilst also streamlining our internal processes so we can be more efficient.”

A huge thank you to Laurie for everything she has contributed to Age UK Isle of Wight over the last 8 years, and for the work she continues to do to support our colleagues, services and the older Island residents at the heart of our charity.