TWO Bendigo Community Health Services employees helped to celebrate the service turning 40 in a special way on Wednesday.
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The service's longest-serving employee, Paula May, and the service's most recent employee, Mellisse Oakes, had the honour of cutting the service's 40th birthday cake at an awards lunch.
The lunch followed the service's annual general meeting this morning.
Speaking after the cake cutting, Ms May said there had been lots of changes in the time she had been at the service.
"I think when I started off 35 years ago, we weren't even amalgamated with Eaglehawk, we were two separate community health, and I was at Kangaroo Flat," she said.
Ms May is a senior worker in the family support program and she started off working part-time, doing 12 hours a week.
"The differences I've noticed, especially now, are how we've progressed and kept up with the community's needs," she said.
She said she especially enjoyed seeing the evolution of the settlement program.
"I work with some linguistically diverse people and the enormity of the new staff and the skills that we've got, and the programs we have now; it's really absolutely amazing," she said.
Despite all the growth, Ms May said she still saw the service as her "other family".
"We still are a family, we're large, we're diverse but we pull together and it's days like this when we come together with each other, it's obvious there's a connection between the sites," she said.
She said she was proud of the service's ongoing ability to help empower families.
"It's trying to give a hand-up not a hand-out to families, and create that capacity to move towards the goals they want to achieve... we're just a vehicle to support them."