Donna Voorhaar, who has volunteered for the past 37 years at the Ridge and Lexington Park rescue squads, will receive the St. Mary’s County Commission for Women’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award on March 18.
Donna Voorhaar, who has volunteered for the past 37 years at the Ridge and Lexington Park rescue squads, will receive the St. Mary’s County Commission for Women’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award on March 18.
Donna Voorhaar has been volunteering for decades and her selfless giving of her time has been noticed by the St. Mary’s County Commission for Women, which selected her as its 2023 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.
Voorhaar will be recognized at the commission’s annual women’s history event — the theme of which is Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Story — on March 18 at the Bay District firehouse.
“There’s a lot of other people who deserve it,” Voorhaar said. “It makes me feel really proud, and overwhelmed to be honest. I really am [excited] but I wish everybody could be recognized.”
The event will also recognize the Hometown Hero, Woman of the Year, for which there are 11 nominations, and Tomorrow’s Woman, which has five young nominees.
Started in 2011, the award Voorhaar will receive was originally called the Lifetime Achievement Award but was renamed in 2011 following the death of the former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice. St. Mary’s County Commission for Women Vice-Chair Norma Pipkin said the award “goes to the individual who has made a lifetime of commitment through volunteerism to St. Mary’s County residents.”
“Oh my goodness, I don’t know if I can find the right words [as to how proud I am of her],” Pipkin said.
During her 30-year career as a secretary to school principals at Great Mills, Frank Knox and Green Holly elementary schools, Voorhaar wanted to do something a little different from education so in 1985 she joined the Ridge Volunteer Rescue Squad.
“I’ve always wanted to help people,” she said. “I really like people and I started with the rescue squad because I thought that would be a really good way to help. Of course I had no idea that I was going to stay as long as I have but I love it. It’s wonderful.”
While there she has held every position except chief. That includes all line positions, a stint on a building committee, service as president of the squad and assistant chief multiple times.
“In those days things were not as busy as they are now and when I started the EMT class, I had not even been on a call with Ridge,” she said.
A friend suggested she join the Lexington Park Rescue Squad as an associate to run on its ambulance to “understand what was going on and to get through the class.”
She remembers her first call was a young man in a motorcycle accident in front of Little Flower School whose ankle was “obviously broken.”
She and friend Kimberly Adams were also among the first women in Southern Maryland to complete the firefighting curriculum.
“We [wanted to] go through the classes because we wanted to learn incident command, the equipment used and how to treat them should they get injured,” she said. “In those days they didn’t have classes like those for EMTs so we went through firefighting classes.”
But she said women weren’t very welcomed in the beginning.
“At first we weren’t met with a lot of [gratitude] because they didn’t feel like there’s a place for women,” she said. “And if there’s a woman in the class [the thought was] she’s just trying to flirt with the guys. But by the time the first essential [classes] were over the instructor realized we were serious and called us and said, ‘Class starts next week and we expect you there.’”
Regardless, Voorhaar tells people that she’s a firefighter “on paper only. The ambulance is my love.”
Voorhaar said she enjoys volunteering in part because of the appreciation she receives.
“It’s helping people and their gratitude is amazing, not only them but their families,” she said. “They seem to become much calmer and happier that someone is there to help them and I like that feeling.”
“One of the things that Justice Ginsberg said was ‘Fight for the things you believe in, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you,’” Pipkin said. “And certainly that emulates what Donna has done. We will never be able to thank her [enough] for her contributions to our community.”
