NCVO seeks memories and photos of its tireless founder Olive Miller

The National Children’s Voluntary Organisation is asking the public to contact them with photographs and memories of its founder Olive Miller ahead of a celebration of her life and work later this month.

“Although not an official National Hero, she’s our hero,” said NCVO programme director Katie Edwards. “She achieved so many incredible things during her life and we want to gather together as many memories as we can of her so we can really pay tribute to her work and the impact she had on Cayman.”

Caymanian icon

Miller passed away at The Pines Retirement Home in George Town in May 2020 at the age of 98 and was described by tributes paid to her in Parliament at the time as a “Caymanian icon”.

Flags were flown at half-mast at all government buildings as a mark of respect.

Miller, who was born in Essex, England in 1921, first came to the Caribbean in 1946 when she worked in Jamaica as a missionary youth worker for the Church of Scotland but made several trips to the Cayman Islands, founding a branch of what became the Girls Brigade.

In 1949, Miller became a teacher at the new Cayman High School and in 1953 she married Caymanian Ray Miller in England. The couple returned to Grand Cayman in 1957 and had a son and a daughter, Kathryn and Nigel.

She later worked on the Tradewinds newspaper, which she helped to establish, moving to Cayman Compass-forebear Caymanian Weekly in 1965. She then worked as Cayman’s first government information officer for 11 years.

During that time, in 1974, Miller founded the National Council of Social Services for the purpose of meeting community needs that other service clubs did not meet at the time, including providing a facility for children with special needs, public preschools, financial funding for welfare and handicapped people, counselling services, retirement homes, scholarship programs and more.

Support for children

Sixteen years later in 1990, the name changed to the National Council of Voluntary Organisations and then again in 2020 to the National Children’s Voluntary Organisation  that it is known as today.

NCVO, a private non-profit organisation, runs a foster home, currently home to 10 children aged between 6 and 17 years old, a preschool and nursery providing subsidised education for children between the ages of 2 and 5 years old and infant childcare for children between the ages of 3 months and 2 years and a community pantry.

Its work is partly funded by government, but it relies on private and corporation donations for the bulk of its income.

While an active participant in the work of the NCVO, Miller also served as a Justice of the Peace from 1978 and was the first manager of The Pines, the first retirement home to be built in the Cayman Islands. She worked there from 1983 until 1991 and moved to live there herself in in later life, keeping active by attending church, socialising with friends, playing games and her continued involvement with NCVO.

In 1980, with Evelyn Andersen, she founded the Pink Ladies Volunteer Corps and in 1994 organised Cayman’s first annual ‘Glamorous Granny’ competition. In 2011 she published her first book “Cayman Rhyme Time”, a children’s book that features traditional songs from the Islands.

Miller’s lifelong community service to the Cayman Islands was recognised in 2018 when she was named an Officer of the British Empire in the Queen’s Honour List, 40 years after receiving the Member of the British Empire honour.

She was also named as one of the ‘Quincentennial Women of the Cayman Islands’ in 2003.

People with memories or photographs of Miller that they would like to share are asked to email NCVO programme director Katie Edwards on [email protected]. The organisation plans to digitise the photos so they can be shared by all on its website and to issue a commemorative book.