Most of the work to care for, maintain and improve our local community green spaces is organised and undertaken entirely by passionate local volunteers. If you’d like to lend a hand please sign up to join in, no previous experience is necessary.
Hope you can join us!
What we’ll be doing:
Throughout the year local volunteers carry out all sorts of activities in our green spaces around Berrylands.
To improve our spaces for local wildlife we carry out jobs like:
- Managing areas of woodland & scrub
- Planting and caring for new trees, bulbs and other plantlife
- Constructing habitat for all sorts of local wildlife
- Controlling invasive plant species to allow our native flora to thrive.
We also try and make our local spaces nicer for the local community too, by doing things like:
- Maintaining and improving paths
- Clearing litter
- Tending to our two local mixed fruit orchards
Booking a place:
Sessions are open for anyone to drop-in on the day.
Although booking isn’t neccesary it’s still helpful for us to know how many people to expect, to ensure we have enough tools and equipment on site, and to enable us to plan appropriate activities.
Who should volunteer:
- Volunteers of all ages are welcome, but we do ask that those under 14 are accompanied by an adult. Those aged 14-18 may volunteer alone, but with parental consent forms to be completed in advance (send us a message to get a copy of the form).
- Please don’t attend volunteer sessions if you or any members of your household have any Covid-19 symptoms, or are otherwise unwell.
What to bring:
Usually we’d lend things like work gloves, safety goggles, and provide refreshments and access to toilet facilities. As an extra precaution, to reduce the possibility of virus transmission between volunteers, we’re not able to offer these things just at the moment.
- Bring your own work or gardening gloves, drinking water and eye protection glasses if appropriate.
- Wear appropriate footwear and clothing for the conditions, weather, and planned activity. This will usually be sturdy shoes or wellies (as the ground is uneven can get very muddy), and clothes you don’t mind getting grubby, ideally with trousers & long sleeves (to avoid stings, cuts and grazes from things like nettles and brambles found throughout our green spaces).
On the day:
- Please arrive in good time for the start of the volunteer session at the meeting point (usually in front of Berrylands Scout Hut on Stirling Walk unless otherwise stated).
- Before starting work a member of the team will give a short welcome briefing on the activities we’ll be carrying out, using tools safely, other general Health & Safety considerations, and any additional Covid-19 specific measures still necessary.
- Although most of the adaptations which enable our sessions to take place during the Covid-19 virus outbreak are no longer strictly necessary, we fully appreciate that lots of people are still nervous (including some of us!), so we’ll be continuing to take sensible
precautions wherever we can to ensure everyone remains as safe and comfortable as possible. - Throughout the event we’ll continue to have hand sanitiser and disinfectant cleaning wipes available, we’ll still ask volunteers to maintain an appropriate social distance from each other, and we’ll aim minimise tool sharing as much as we can.
- We also continue ask everyone to be mindful that different people are still at different levels of comfort with returning to pre-covid behaviours.