The King’s Award is the highest award a local voluntary group can receive in the UK and Channel Islands, equivalent to an MBE.
While there are other charities in the Bailiwick to have received a Queen’s Award during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II, this is the island’s first KAVS since its inception in 2023.
The Conservation Volunteers have been protecting the Bailiwick’s natural environment and improving biodiversity since 1996. Work parties take place every Wednesday morning and alternate Saturday mornings throughout the year on a wide variety of sites and missions, and more than 200 volunteers so far this year have supported the activities.
Last year more than 90 working parties operated across 31 Guernsey sites. The charity also visits Alderney each year to work with the Alderney Wildlife Trust, worked in Sark last year, and also operates in Herm and Lihou on occasions.
Volunteers have removed more than 250 tonnes of invasive non-native sour fig, which has enabled native plants to regrow and spread. These native plants can then provide food and shelter for insects and small mammals, which sour fig does not.
For the past four years, the group has been primarily focused on removing invasive stinking onions in Bluebell Wood, with more than half a million bulbs removed, allowing space for the native bluebells to bloom.
The award process has involved a year of nominations, assessments and waiting for the outcome. Following the initial nomination process, some ‘undercover’ assessors joined in on some of the work parties around March time, before many meetings were held between the GCV hierarchy and the award assessors.
It was then months before the team heard anything, until early October, when GCV operations director Angela Salmon saw the congratulatory email sitting in her inbox.
‘It was a bit of a shriek, and then just clapping on my own at my laptop – a bit odd, but that’s what I was doing,’ she said. Only she and four other directors knew, and they kept it secret from their volunteers until the official announcement today.
‘It’s a massive honour. Thank you to all the volunteers over many, many years who have given their time to support our small, local charity,’ she said.
‘This award is the highest recognition for our volunteers and supporters and it will be with great pride that our group continues its important conservation work.
‘Receiving this award is a huge honour and we hope it will further raise awareness and the profile of conservation needs in our island and of the value of volunteering.’
Ms Salmon said that the volunteers did not only serve as a conservation charity but also one for social wellbeing, as its activities encourage people to make new friends and connect with nature.
She encouraged any charity to go through with a nomination, saying that it was very useful for GCV to learn a lot about themselves and where they were as a charity from the process.
Representatives of GCV will receive the award crystal and certificate from Lt-Governor Sir Richard Cripwell in the coming months. Two volunteers from GCV will also attend a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace next year in company with fellow recipients of the award.
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