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Why volunteer: Who (or what) benefits from your help?

Canalside volunteers

You may be willing to give your time to volunteer in order to help others, to meet people or just to escape the house. Whatever your reasons, someone or something will be very grateful for your help. Read below to see some examples:

The old stuff

The tunnel path over the derelict Hincaster Tunnel on the Lancaster Canal is a Scheduled Monument. This means it has been recognised as being important and worth protecting. It has to be conserved.

Volunteers from the Lancaster Canal Trust have helped to do this by restoring a bridge over the path (amongst other things). With training from a skilled craftsman, they did stonework repairs to the bridge, ensuring its condition gets better rather than worse.


Birds and beasties

Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxford Wildlife Trust do a lot of environment conservation work around Weston Turville Reservoir, feeder to the Grand Union Canal near Tring. This includes hedgelaying, footpath works and more general biodiversity management. The Tring Reservoirs are a Site of Special Scientific Interest and recognised as particularly important for migratory birds.


People – young and old

The Working Boats volunteers in the Midlands use former cargo carrying boats to bring the waterways to life. It gives visitors, particularly school children, an opportunity to travel back in time by experiencing the size (and smell) of a boatman’s cabin, hear stories told by volunteers about boating in icy winters and see the skills kept alive to maintain the boats for future generations.


Making things happen

Volunteers reach the parts that paid employees can’t reach. Without the input of volunteers, the waterways would be a very different place as there simply aren’t the resources to do everything that needs to be done. Without volunteers, all those extra school visits wouldn’t have taken place, those extra habitats wouldn’t have been conserved and those extra visitors wouldn’t have visited. Guided walks, which encourage wider understanding of the wild and wonderful things that live around our waterways, such as the bats at Earlswood Lakes, couldn’t have happened without volunteers giving their time.

Funding

Volunteers help raise cash. This can be in the literal sense, by rattling collection tins, or it may be in matching their time to big funding applications. Many large funders will pay 50% (for example) of the total budget costs but are very pleased to see some or all of the remaining 50% covered by volunteer time. Depending on the task being carried out, a volunteer giving a day of their time can be worth up to £350 of value to a project.

Expertise

Volunteers whose day time job does not involve the waterways can bring a whole range of different skills and experiences to organisations who engage (or are run by) volunteers on the waterways. A huge number of volunteer groups around the country hold different expertise in a range of different areas with a good number of retired professionals within their membership.