By Kath Gannaway
YARRA Glen CFA volunteers and a Yarra Ranges foster family have found a friend in common in the Yarra Glen Freemasons lodge.
The lodge, in conjunction with Freemasons Victoria, last week made donations of $4000 each to the brigade and to the Rebecca Foundation through foster care organisation Anglicare.
After the tragic death of a young girl they had fostered, lodge member and foster parent Ray Galloway and his wife Beverley started the Rebecca Foundation to assist children in foster care gain services not provided under government funding.
Yarra Glen lodge master Scott Barry said the Yarra Glen Masons, which has 65 members from around the Yarra Valley and as far away as Narre Warren and Eltham, had put in an all-out effort to raise the $4000 at a charity auction. The money was then matched dollar for dollar by the Masons’ state board of benevolence.
Yarra Glen CFA captain Bill Boyd said the brigade had a long association with the Masons who 15 years ago funded breathing apparatus and more recently a GPS system.
“This donation will enable us to get a laptop computer, which will match up with the GPS and give us the capability to plot fires and provide accurate locations for water bombing and other purposes,” he said.
Marg Kearsley, manager of Anglicare in Lilydale, said the money would be used to help a teenage girl get the orthodontic work she badly needed.
Ms Kearsley said the girl, along with her siblings, was in the care of a single foster parent, after the death of his wife.
“This will be such a wonderful boost to her morale,” Ms Kearsley said.
Ms Kearsley said the donation was also a boost for everyone involved in providing foster care services.
She said children were the most disadvantaged. “If they don’t get their needs met when they are young they are run a very high risk of getting into drugs and alcohol,” she said.
“We still have some wonderful successes but one of our biggest problems remains recruiting volunteers.”
Freemasons board of benevolence vice-president Frank Fordyce said the efforts of the Yarra Glen Masonic Lodge members in raising such a fantastic amount of money, and the initiative of Freemasons Victoria in matching that money, was part of a move to raise the public profile of the organisation’s charity work, which he said had been one of the mainstays of Freemasonry since its inception, but not actively promoted.
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