Sarah Morris tells Peninsula Living about her community-centric approach to life on the Northern Beaches, and how that led her to become the 2022 Pittwater Woman of the Year.
Mum-of-three, Sarah, has lived on the Northern Beaches all her life and now works towards supporting people wherever they need it most.
“The community here is beautiful, anytime you ask for help, the Northern Beaches answer,” Sarah says.
During the pandemic, Sarah co-founded a community outreach group called Acts Of Kindness (AOK), which has gone on to help many across the Peninsula and Sydney, from people who are homeless to children at our local schools.
“We run food services for the homeless but we’re basically here to answer any calls from the community, just to connect communities, share community kindness and connect and support people,” she tells Peninsula Living.
Sarah and her volunteers run a food service every week at Wentworth Park, where she says around 10 people are currently living rough.
“We go down with meals and drinks and hot tea and coffee and things like that.”
One of the guys there has a dog which was sadly attacked, resulting in it having puppies.
Sarah says she couldn’t leave the dog and puppies there, so she has been looking after them at her house for the past 10 weeks.
Sarah then put the man who owns the dog into a hotel so that he could work, and she said he hasn’t stopped working since.
“He’s now got a place to live, he isn’t living under the bridge anymore,” she says.
Although Sarah and her group of volunteers have had many successful stories, it hasn’t come without its daily challenges.
“Trying to do everything with no money has been our biggest challenge,” she says.
“Trying to work out how to help people and how to get the food that’s wasted back to people that need it.”
Sarah says one of her biggest achievements was a few months ago, when her three children went up to her and said, ‘Mum, we didn’t know that you could just start something’.
“I said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’,” she recalls.
“They said ‘You literally just went out and started feeding people and now you have a community outreach called AOK and you’ve got like 50 people’. So, I said ‘Oh I didn’t know that either,” Sarah laughs.
“We talk about the ripple effect of kindness, because people think that if they do a small act of kindness that it won’t make a difference, but they don’t see the ripple.
“It’ll hit that person and then that person will feel really good, and they’ll do something. It does ripple further than the single action you make.”
Sarah says being named 2022 Pittwater Woman of the Year in recognition of her work has been ‘overwhelming’.
“I’m really proud of everything that I do.
“Its also about my volunteers as well. We’ve got about a hundred people behind the scenes that support me and anytime I’ve got a crazy idea of helping someone they are straight on and actioning it.”
