Where are we now?
Volunteering is about taking part in an activity, without payment, often for the
benefit of others, the community and the environment. Here at the Park, volunteering
encourages involvement and participation: providing skills, improving wellbeing,
and generating goodwill within the region.
There are currently four main areas of activity in the Park
1. Volunteers managed by us
Our volunteer programme enables people to contribute their time and effort to a
range of initiatives within the Park.
2. Corporate volunteering
We also provide opportunities for external organisations to undertake group volunteering
activities that can help team-building exercises and to meet their corporate social
responsibility targets.
3. External voluntary sector organisations within the Park
This voluntary sector (often referred to as the charity sector or third sector)
includes a broad range of charity organisations that operate in the Park, such as
the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, sports clubs, and community payback groups.
4. Friends of the Park
Friends of the Park are groups, operating from specific sites, encourage people
to become involved in the management of the Park.
What do we want to achieve?
- To become a venue for a broad range of volunteering activities.
- To develop an appropriate infrastructure throughout the Park to support volunteering
opportunities.
- To continue to enhance and expand the current offer. This will include:
- Our volunteer programme
- Opportunities for the corporate sector volunteering
- Opportunities for the wider voluntary sector organisations
- Friends of Groups
How will we deliver?
On our estate
We will
- Implement an ongoing incremental increase of our volunteer programme, both in numbers
of participants taking part, and in the range of task types and locations within
the Park.
- Continue to target ‘hard to reach’ groups with our volunteer programme (i.e. groups
within the community who may not typically be users of the Park, or who often take
part in volunteering activities).
- Implement a ‘Friends of Groups’ programme for specific sites throughout Park and
for the Lee Valley Regional Park as a whole.
- Develop our corporate volunteer offer, to create stronger partnership relationships
with businesses, and to assist in the delivery of their corporate social responsibility
aims.
- Develop volunteer support nodes within our primary visitor facilities. These will
provide changing facilities, food and drink, meeting/teaching space and tool storage.
- Explore the commercial sponsorship opportunities to provide mobile toilets and welfare
facilities.
Working with others
We will
- Develop closer volunteering initiatives with other voluntary sector organisations
to provide joint opportunities within our estate. This will include the Olympic
Volunteer programme.
- Work in partnership with other landowners to encourage their participation in volunteer
programmes and initiatives.