There’s a man in the Hills Shire who has spent every spare Tuesday for the past decade helping strangers sort out their paperwork. No salary. No fanfare. Just Lindsay McEwan, a Justice of the Peace volunteer, sitting across a desk from someone who needs a document witnessed and doing exactly that.
Ten years. Since January this year alone, the council’s JP volunteers have helped more than 1,300 people and processed upwards of 4,000 documents. McEwan was among those recognised at the Council’s Volunteer Service Awards Ceremony during National Volunteer Week, which ran from 18 to 24 May 2026.
He’s not unusual around here. That’s what’s striking about The Hills.
The volunteering rate in this corner of north-west Sydney sits well above the New South Wales state average — a fact Mayor Dr Michelle Byrne raised at the awards, though she was careful not to make it sound like a statistic. It isn’t, really. Behind it are people in high-vis vests pulling weeds from bushland, people in library aprons running book sales, and Hills Community Care volunteers who — between them — delivered 15,500 meals to residents who couldn’t get out to collect their own food.
The Friends of the Hills Library raised more than $5,000 over the past year. The Hills Youth Army hit record membership numbers. The SES volunteers didn’t stop working at 5 pm during emergencies; they rarely do.
National Volunteer Week exists to put a name to all of this. Whether it succeeds is debatable — most volunteers would be the first to shrug off the recognition — but the awards ceremony and a trivia night organised by council gave people a chance to be in the same room as each other for once. (A team called Flash Four, drawn from Bushcare, Hills Community Care, and the Community Environment Centre, won the trivia. Bragging rights were reportedly taken seriously.)
If you’ve been thinking about getting involved, council runs programs across Bushcare, Meals on Wheels, event volunteering, the Bidjiwong Community Nursery, and more. Details are at thehills.nsw.gov.au
