New Year Honour for former Bo'ness Academy pupil

Zoe Sayers has been awarded the honour in the King’s list for her service to the community in Kent during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 29-year-old was nominated for the honour as a result of the voluntary work she undertook in Kent and the South East with the veterans charity RE:ACT Disaster Response, while she continued in parallel to work as a teacher providing remote lessons.

Dovetailing her voluntary response work into her normal working day as a geography teacher at the Sir Roger Manwood School in Sandwich, Zoe was involved in tasks including arranging delivery of food parcels to vulnerable people, cleaning and re-stocking SECAmb NHS Trust Ambulances and working frontline to support staff in a Covid-hit Royal British Legion care home.

She also relocated to Plymouth to help in the operation of a mass vaccination centre in the South West.

Zoe has been living south of the border since leaving Bo’ness Academy and attending Plymouth University, where she obtained a BSc Honours in Physical Geography with Geology.

She then moved to South Wales to complete an MSc in Disaster Management for Environmental Hazards.

Having witnessed first hand the effects of a major environmental disaster in the Himalayas when she was 16, and on a British Schools Exploration Society expedition, she committed herself towards humanitarian voluntary work.

Speaking about her New Year honour, Zoe said: “I’m very honoured to receive this award. In RE:ACT we deploy as a team and although the whole team can’t receive individual recognition, I am accepting this on their behalf for all the outstanding work done by every RE:ACT volunteer who deployed during the pandemic.“Volunteering is something I have loved doing for over a decade. It’s part of who I am. What it means to me is that I am helping, in whatever way I can, to improve a situation for someone else – that could be from the smallest gesture to supporting someone at their most desperate moment. Volunteering means you’re always giving something back.”