The morning I arrive at Bloomhill Cancer Care, the car park is overflowing. A kindly woman shows me a ‘secret’ park. She is one of Bloomhill’s legion of 380 volunteers. Together, they complete anywhere between 5000 and 6000 hours of voluntary service a month. These volunteers are the backbone of this amazing, grassroots, community-driven and community-funded not-for-profit organisation, which has been operating on the Coast for 28 years – without government funding.
As I enter the centre, I notice a sign asking me to leave my ego at the door. At the café entrance, Bloomhill’s general manager, Mervat Quirke, is talking animatedly with a group of volunteers. She’s doing her morning walk-through, thanking everyone for their time. It’s a ritual rather than routine, one which is an important part of her day.
The centre’s vibe is warm, welcoming, happy. It’s not what I expected of a place where people, cancer patients and their families, turn for support in their darkest hour. But being here I can’t help but feel buoyed.
“We work alongside the hospital system,” Mervat explains. “They’re treating the cancer. We’re the safety net. Our care staff understand the journey of our cancer clients. They create a soft place to land.”
Mervat joined the Bloomhill board as a volunteer in 2008 and became CEO in 2010. During that time, she was also appointed as one of the trustees of the land.
After eight years, she left to work at the Thompson Institute at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where the focus was on suicide prevention, dementia risk and treating post-traumatic stress disorder among returned servicemen and women. The experience deepened her understanding of prevention and lifestyle interventions – insights she would later bring back to Bloomhill.
In 2024, while still a trustee of the land, she was approached by the Leukaemia Foundation and Bloomhill to discuss amalgamation.
“They [the foundation] were talking about Bloomhill with such passion. They could see the beauty in what we had achieved,” she says.
“I thought I would jump back in a heartbeat if it meant supporting a stronger Bloomhill with the safety net of the Leukaemia Foundation.”
Mervat returned in November 2024 as general manager and now also plays a development role with the Leukaemia Foundation.
The partnership is mutually beneficial: the Leukaemia Foundation hopes to replicate the Bloomhill model in regional and rural communities, while Bloomhill now has secure backing from a national charity.
A school-leaver at 16, Mervat started work at Kmart. After her father died, she found her old staff badge in his drawer.
“I never knew my dad had so much pride in keeping that little badge.”
She believes everything, every opportunity in life, starts somewhere.
“I think if there’s anything that our parents brought us up with, it was, you don’t always have to be working towards your passion. But what’s going to get you there is going to be a whole heap of different experiences.”
The youngest of 11 children, Mervat was born in Tripoli, Lebanon. At six, her family fled war in the dead of night and settled in Australia. Mervat says that every day her parents reminded her and her siblings how privileged they were to live in a country and in a society that respects people, respects choice and affords opportunity.
“You’ve been given that,” her dad would say. “Now what are you doing to give back?”
That sense of fair exchange shaped her path into the not-for-profit sector and her refugee story also in part explains why she’s so passionate about causes and people.
“When I say passion, I think it’s just this natural compassion you have in your heart, especially when you’ve experienced challenges.”
Early roles in marketing, communications and data sharpened her understanding of audience impact. But life’s most defining education – and greatest personal challenge – would come later and from the homefront.
In 2005, Mervat’s husband Steve was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive grade four brain tumour. He was given three months to live. Mervat stopped work to become his full-time carer; their youngest child was only one. Daily hospital trips to Brisbane became a blur.
“When a diagnosis happens, you don’t always know what you need. People ask how they can help, but you genuinely don’t know.”
A friend suggested Bloomhill, though it took some time before Mervat and Steve felt ready to approach the charity. When they did, Mervat found immediate psycho-social and practical support.
“They actually see what you need beyond what you see yourself.”
Nurses organised transport, delivered groceries and meals and assigned a respite buddy who became, in Mervat’s words, “my soul sister”.
“I will always hold so much gratitude for that connection,” she says softly.
While those interventions did not change Steve’s diagnosis, they transformed how the family lived with it. He survived 18 months, passing away in August 2006 at 43.
Bloomhill continued counselling the children. When Mervat, newly widowed, offered to volunteer, she was gently told to wait.
“That’s the beauty of what they do. They look after you even when you think you’re ready.”
When Mervat eventually joined the board in 2008, Bloomhill operated from a three-bedroom Queenslander where emotional conversations often unfolded within earshot of others.
Drawing on her not-for-profit background, Mervat pursued infrastructure grants and helped expand the centre and its social enterprise model, including op shops that sustain services.
Today, Bloomhill welcomes 25 to 40 new clients each month and delivers 600 to 800 care allocations monthly. Still, she says: “We want to do more.”
She continues to wear Steve’s badge and speaks of feeling his presence at the centre. Cancer patients, she says, are her greatest teachers.
“No one better teaches resilience than a cancer patient. You see them showing up to treatment, supporting their families, trying to understand their new normal. That’s resilience in action.”
Her own resilience is intertwined with faith. Mervat shares that she was brought up to respect life and to believe that our souls don’t simply vanish. That understanding helped her navigate losing Steve.
After Steve’s final operation, when he was told the tumours had returned and he had weeks to live, a dear friend, “a man of strong faith”, asked what he feared most.
“Steve said: ‘I’m scared for who I’m leaving behind because I know what grief feels like’. And his friend just said, ‘Wherever you’re going, God will be with you. And you’re not leaving them – God will be with them too.’ That gave Steve comfort, and it gave me strength.”
Life is often described as a journey, and while Mervat claims not to love the phrase, she returns to it anyway. What she sees now, after decades of grief, growth and compassionate service, is not a series of isolated events but a pattern of connections, of people helping people without ego.
“We want to promote our volunteers and they want nothing of it,” she says with awe.
Looking around the café, she sees not isolated stories but a web of connection – former clients’ children volunteering; tradespeople donating time in the garden to help maintain the 10-acre sanctuary on a rise at Buderim.
“It’s like a spider’s web, everything is connected. It all comes back around.”
As we return our coffee cups, Mervat shares a recent moment: seeing her youngest, Elizabeth, now 22, volunteering at the café.
“The last time she’d been here she was needing counselling. Seeing her behind the counter in an apron was very emotional.”
The café is open to the public Monday to Thursday for breakfast and lunch. Mervat explains it’s also a gentle entry point; many newly diagnosed patients test the waters there before seeking support.
If there is one message Mervat wants amplified, it is about timing.
“The earlier someone connects after diagnosis, the better the outcomes. We hear it all the time: ‘I wish I’d come sooner’. I say the same about my own experience.”