I help out as a volunteer at our local park's Information Centre and have done so for about 20 years. The centre is only open for a couple of hours on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon. We sell notelets with pictures of the park, notepads and pens, tote bags, leaflets on trees or ducks and all kinds of food for feeding birds, squirrels or ducks. We also try to answer any questions from the public about a particular tree or duck or problem that has arisen. The park has an enormous lake and is home to about 30 or more herons, so we are an interesting case for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who every April come to visit with their cameras, telescopes and binoculars to view the herons nesting with their babies.
When we first moved to this area (see here), we visited the park frequently as a married couple just chilling from our busy jobs. I always find walking by water (be it the sea, a river or a lake) calming and I can empty out any worries I have. When Kay was born, we would take her to this park and she would enjoy seeing the ducks and geese or playing on the swings and seesaws. Then as a dog-owner, I would visit every morning to give the dog a long walk off-lead and through that got to know many other dogwalkers, one of whom has become a close friend. When Greg was at the height of his alcoholic addiction, I found it a calming place to come to escape the nightmare. I still keep involved through the Information Centre and do a shift about once a month there.
When the Covid pandemic struck, the centre was closed for many many months and only gradually re-opened when it was safe to do so. But many volunteers were either shy to return in case they were exposed to Covid or just got complacent and stayed away, so the centre was still often closed for lack of staff. The result was that a lot of the public did not know the centre had reopened and were often surprised when they found it was. I have recently been involved in recruiting more volunteers by advertising on our local Facebook group and a good twenty people have come forward. I have been involved in the last few weeks in training them up to do the shifts.
Last week we officially opened our community garden - a patch of land alongside the centre which we are turning into a place where people can come and plant flowers or vegetables or just watch others doing so. Amongst our newly-recruited volunteers have been a few men who have been very helpful in doing a lot of heavy lifting, sawing and clearing to make it possible. On Friday I was given permission to drive my car into the park at 5mph to transport loads of plants the Chairwoman had bought from a local chain nursery. She is unable to drive so needed help getting them there. There were all sorts of plants ranging from tomatoes, lettuce, bedding plants, perennials and small fruit trees. This weekend they will all be planted by the public who want to get involved.
With good weather and the summer finally approaching, I hope it will be a success in getting more people in the community involved in communing with nature.
2 comments:
Keep up the good work, Addy! Things like that are very important, bit as you have observed, such projects have difficulties finding reliable and capable volunteers.
I know what you mean about the park providing a sort of escape when things were especially difficult with your husband. On my blog, I sometimes show the deer park at the outskirts of my hometown. I often went there when my husband was bingeing, just to get away from that situation at home, hoping he‘d have fallen asleep by the time I returned. No matter the time of year or weather, I always saw the park as a kind of shelter for me.
I hope that the activity day went well. By the way, when you train up new volunteers do you get them doing press-ups and star jumps?
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