Volunteers of the Year
Congratulations to our Volunteers of the Year 2024-2025!
Every year our school runs smoothly because of our dedicated parent and community volunteers. Each volunteer plays an important role at our school and our community could certainly not run without the hours of volunteer effort shared with us.
In 2010 we established two awards to recognize exceptional examples of the spirit of volunteerism at our school. The awards were named after the inaugural winners.
The Aubrey Family was a cornerstone family at our school, guiding their five children from pretwinkle to graduation and involved in volunteering at all levels from helping out at group class to taking on the role of President of the Board. They won the award in 2010, had their youngest child graduate from SuzukiMusic in 2022 and continue to volunteer with IT help as needed to this day.
Anne McKerral won the McKerral Award for outstanding community volunteer back in 2010 and retired from her role as Treasurer at the end of 2023 after 30 years in the role.
It is our pleasure to announce this year’s award recipients:
Aubrey Award for outstanding parent volunteer:
Hubert Furey is this year’s recipient of the Aubrey Award for outstanding parent volunteer. Hubert has a long history of volunteering starting back in the Fall of 2014 when he offered to do photography, videography and slideshow editing. Since then he has been the videographer for our Faculty Benefit and Viva Suzuki concerts. He created many of the slideshows that we used throughout past Viva Suzuki Concerts. He joined the Board of Directors back in Fall of 2019 as Director and in the Fall of 2021 took on the role of Board President during the extra stressful “Covid times”. After four years as Board President he is stepping down from that role but continuing on the Board as our IT Volunteer. Thank you Hubert for your dedicated volunteering all these years and for your continued volunteering in the future!
McKerral Award for outstanding community or student volunteer:
This year’s McKerral Award for outstanding community or student volunteer goes to Sarah Holmesdale. Sarah is a graduating cello student and has spent the past 2 years volunteering extensively with our school. Sarah began volunteering with the younger students in the Fall of 2023 as she was working towards her Teen Mentorship certificate which she received in November of 2023. Since then she has been a regular group class helper, cello demonstrator for Headstart classes, practice buddy, and has also helped out at some of our events including our Play Ins and Outreach events. Sarah helped narrate a musical story at our Greenboro Library outreach event. This year alone Sarah volunteered 34 hours in her mentorship role and has been a wonderful role model to other SuzukiMusic students. Sarah hopes to become a teacher and we know she’d be amazing at that career! Congratulations Sarah and we wish you well in your future endeavors!
A message from Emma Grant-Zypchen about Sarah’s help over the past two years:
Sarah’s help in my group classes has been invaluable over the past 2 years — practically (tuning etc), energetically (contagious enthusiasm, authenticity, and gentle kindness) and musically (supporting with her beautiful sound and enriching with harmony parts). She was an extremely positive influence on all of the younger students, but her impact on the girl who she was a practice buddy for, was the most profound. This student of mine was really struggling to maintain a positive attitude in her practice at home, getting extremely frustrated when she couldn’t immediately achieve what she wanted to. Through her sessions with Sarah, her attitude towards her cello practice completely changed — a touch of humour if her fingers didn’t cooperate, a trust that she would be able to teach those fingers what to do through repeated efforts, and a generally more joyous and appreciative approach to her instrument. Sarah’s presence will be very missed in our studio!