It was with great sadness that we at Bridport and District Citizens Advice learned that our colleague, and friend Mark Van de Weyer has died in Dorset County Hospital recently.

Mark became a trustee for us in 2018 though before that he had completed the training preparing him to work with our advice team.

However, our chairman of trustees at the time felt Mark’s talents would be of great benefit to the board and he was persuaded away from the frontline and was appointed as one of our trustees.

Mark was such an asset to Bridport and District Citizens Advice.

He generously shared his knowledge, experience, and networking skills.

We benefited too from Mark being a journalist.

He always knew who to talk to and he provided us with a great deal of useful insight from Bridport and around the county.

Mark worked tirelessly for our service, getting involved in many of our publicity campaigns.

It was he that wrote our regular column for this newspaper and for other local publications.

For the Dorset wide network of Citizens Advice services, Mark took the lead on publicity and helped to present our work and the achievements of Citizens Advice to a wider audience.

As a trustee Mark was fully involved in all areas of our work and he served on various of our board sub-committees.

He always brought fresh thinking to our meetings.

He got stuck into working groups too, always delivering anything he committed to working on.

As those of us who knew him will agree, as well as highly professional, he was a lovely person, a pleasure to work with and always supportive.

He always had the future of our Citizens Advice service both in Bridport and across the county at the heart of everything he did.

He will be sadly missed by us all.

Tony Rogers

Chairman

Rovarn Wickremasinghe

Chief officer

Bridport and District Citizens Advice