Four years ago when Fay Angel was taking her dog for a walk, she had no idea it would be the first step in developing a community garden that would benefit everyone from local kids to offenders.
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Despite being named Dubbo Regional Council's 2022 Senior Citizen of the Year this Australia Day, Ms Angel was quick to praise the efforts of her fellow volunteers rather than her own.
"I'm just incredibly humbled and honoured to volunteer with such wonderful people," she said.
Ms Angel has been integral in the development and enhancement of the Walan Community Garden for the past four years, and has helped to develop it into a space that is inclusive and accessible for all.
Over the past four years the garden has been transformed from a bare paddock to a thriving, visually spectacular organic community garden.
I'm just incredibly humbled and honoured to volunteer with such wonderful people
- Fay Angel
"I was walking my dog past this paddock one day and there were a group of young women there, and I said 'what's going on girls?'," Ms Angel said.
"They said 'we're making a community garden would you like to join?', so it's gone from there."
Apart from maintaining the gardens, Ms Angel is also a certified volunteer supervisor and spends time overseeing offenders required to complete community service hours as part of their sentence.
This experience she said had been "wonderful".
"It's very interesting everyone has a story, we have no idea what the offender's have done, but if they want to tell us, what gets said in the garden stays in the garden," Ms Angel said.
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"Some stay in touch, some are in touch after four years. They come back and visit and we swap vegetables for work, it's very simple, there's no rule book, we're just mates."
For Ms Angel, who is an advocate for treating everyone equally and with respect no matter their past, believed physical outdoor work, completing projects and receiving acknowledgement and praise helps build the self-esteem and mental health of visitors to the garden.
The Clontarf Foundation and PCYC also bring their participants to the garden to engage and to share in the delight and education of growing and enjoying food.
Peppercorn day care centre also brings their children to experience the garden, and pull out an endless supply of carrots, which they enjoy crunching on while running and playing outdoors in the garden.
Ms Angel is not only a volunteer supervisor for the garden, but she's also been very hands on involved in designing garden beds, planting, weeding, watering, mowing and spreading mulch and compost with her team of volunteers.
But for Ms Angel the best part of volunteering at the community garden she said has been the mateship.
"It's the laughs, the funny things that happen, the physical work, the mental health aspect, it's just the mateship," Ms Angel said.
The next project on Ms Angel's radar will be helping to establish the new wellbeing garden at the Western Cancer Centre at the Dubbo Hospital.