Passionate about educating adults and children about nature, Community First Yorkshire has helped this small local organisation to build a huge team of volunteers.

What was the challenge?

The Wood Meadow Trust plants a unique combination of trees and flower meadows. With only two paid staff members on the project, the Trust relies heavily on its volunteers. In 2018, 81 volunteers contributed 1,178 hours. Recruiting and retaining volunteers was crucial to the Trust’s success but the organisation had never asked its volunteers officially about what it was like helping on the project.

Emma Daniels, Project Coordinator, explains: “We already had a volunteer programme, but we’d never asked our volunteers for feedback to see if it was okay and what we could improve on. We wanted suggestions for how we could increase the take up of volunteering opportunities.”

With volunteers critical to the project’s success, Emma contacted Community First Yorkshire for help.

How did Community First Yorkshire help?

Lizzie, from Community First Yorkshire, visited the site to meet the group’s organisers and walked through the meadow to get a feel for the organisation and its environment.  She talked through the volunteering programme with Emma and reviewed all of the policies the Wood Meadow Trust had created.

Emma explained, “Lizzie came up with a list of advice and suggestions she thought might be useful for us. We have implemented every single one of them!”

With Community First Yorkshire’s support, the Wood Meadow Trust rewrote its volunteer policy and now describes it as ‘much better’.

Lizzie also advised on other changes. “We’ve introduced a new system to encourage more visitors to complete our evaluation form, which has really helped us gain a better idea of what they want. The feedback has really helped us when making funding applications as funders always want to see evidence of feedback,” Emma explains.
The trust also produced a new flyer about volunteering and the team now go out and give talks to local groups to recruit volunteers.

About the organisation.

The Wood Meadow Trust (formerly Hagges Wood) is a registered charity set up in 2013 to create wood meadows covering about 25 acres. There are two paid staff members on the project. The Esmee Fairburn Trust funds one post, for 15 hours per week and the second post of Volunteer  Coordinator has one day a week funded through North Yorkshire County Council’s Stronger Communities. The charity has a large bank of volunteers.

What does the future look like?

Emma concludes, “Community First Yorkshire provided really useful information and has helped us to understand how to recruit more volunteers and the need to foster relationships with them. That’s something we hadn’t done before. We have a huge group of volunteers now. The advice
and help from Community First Yorkshire have helped us get here.”
With Community First Yorkshire’s support, there are clear policies and a streamlined and effective system for a small staff team who have limited hours to spend on the project.