Since he moved to Matatā in 1986, Gavin Dennis has been involved with a myriad of community organisations, from being a school board member to fire chief and lots in between.

He has been awarded the King’s Service Medal for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the community in this year’s honours list.

Mr Dennis said he had always had a love of getting involved with organisations that did great things in the community.

“It’s just enjoyable. I’ve always given back to the community, and I believe in community.”

Since retiring from work, rather than putting his feet up, he has become more involved.

“When you retire, it gives you the freedom to do some neat things.  I’m still just having a ball.”

Mr Dennis joined the Matatā Volunteer Fire Brigade in 1987, less than a year after moving to Matatā.

“After the earthquake in 1987, I came down to the fire station and said, ‘do you guys need a hand’. They said, ‘no, we’ve got it all in hand’. Then a week later, one of them came back and said, ‘how about joining up? We’ve got spaces’.”

Mr Dennis has been with the brigade ever since and is currently chief fire officer.

During his time on the brigade, he has been involved in protecting the town through several major flood events.

“During the 2004 Edgecumbe floods, I remember we were there in the middle of the night pumping out the sub-station.”

He said the 2005 debris flow that struck Matatā, bowled homes and cut off State Highway 2 and the railway line for several days, saw some amazing work by the entire Matatā brigade over the following two to three weeks.

“I did a lot of work around the Awatarariki/Pioneer Place area as support for Brian Dobson who was fire chief at the time. I remember going for a couple of days without much sleep, working through the night when all the other brigades went home.

“Over the first two nights after it happened, I remember staying down here and working with a paid relief crew they’d brought down from Rotorua, just to make sure the town was safe at night.

“It brought the community together in an amazing way where people stood up and helped each other. We in the brigade were able to facilitate some of the stuff that happened.”

During the Edgecumbe flood in 2017, he was in one of the first fire appliances that responded.

“I remember walking waist deep with another young member of our brigade because we’d been called to rescue a mother and young baby from a house that had been flooded. We didn’t quite get there because of the amazing effort from local farmers, police and everyone else who had got there before we did, but we then joined in with the rest of the rescue effort in town.”

He instigated the Matatā Volunteer Fire Brigade’s cadet programme in 2014, for young people aged 15 to 16 to join the brigade to gain experience and life skills. The programme has been successful in recruiting young people as volunteer recruit firefighters when eligible, forming a large part of the brigade’s membership over the past 10 years.

"The first cadet we had actually attracted her father, plus two of her other family members to become part of the brigade.

"The exciting thing is that every cadet we’ve had has gone on to get a job. Some of them have gone into the police. One is an intensive care paramedic in Auckland. I’ve got another one who is going to work at St Johns and one that became a professional firefighter.

"Kids have been able to gain confidence, job skills and, as they’ve gone through the system, learnt to deal with emergency situations and cooly and calmly get to work and do stuff for people.”

One of the things he’s most proud of is being instrumental in establishing the brigade’s Medical First Response Unit in 2004, one of 60 such units in the country and making up about 65 percent of the brigade’s callouts.

“In 2004, we had a farmer’s wife who performed CPR on her husband for 45 minutes before the ambulance got there.”

This revealed “a real need in the community” for a medical first response service. Mr Dennis organised meetings with St John Ambulance, the Fire Service hierarchy and was one of the two first brigade members to do a pre-hospital emergency care course.

These days, the whole brigade is qualified in both firefighting and medical response.

Mr Dennis has also been an ambulance officer for16 years and currently drives patient transfer ambulances between Whakatāne and Tauranga.

“We have a wonderful relationship with St John, and we have intensive care paramedic Lance Laing who has been coming to the brigade to teach us voluntarily for the past 16 years.”

When Mr Dennis’s children were young, he served on the Matatā Public School board for eight years, and the Trident High School board for several years as well, staying well after his own children had left school.

Mr Dennis has been a Whakatāne district councillor since 2019, which he sees as an extension to the other work he’s done, to “provide a conduit to the average person to help them with their issues”.

Before this, he was a member of the Rangitaiki Community Board from 2007 to 2019, serving four years as deputy chairman.

He has been chairman of the Eastern Bay of Plenty Road Safety Operations Group since 2019.

Before joining the brigade, and for a while afterward, he did Victim Support across the Rangitaiki Plains.

“I’m very grateful to the people I work with. I’ve realised after all this time that some people enjoy fishing, some people enjoy gardening, I just really love being part of community organisations that are doing great things in their communities.

“It’s the satisfaction of being able to help people up.”