Jersey Heritage joins national volunteering celebrations

Wednesday 03 June 2015

Jersey Heritage will mark National Volunteers’ Week with a party and special events for the people who give up more than 12,000 hours of their time every year to help the organisation.

National Volunteers’ Week is organised by NCVO, which champions the volunteering sector and volunteering the length and breadth of the country. From now until 7 June, events are being held all over the British Isles to recognise the efforts and value of the millions of volunteers who give of their time freely to help organisations that rely on their support to deliver their services.

Volunteer roles at Jersey Heritage sites vary from practical tasks such as sewing – making and mending dressing up costumes, mending flags, sewing Hessian sheets for use on the Cider Press – or restoring the heritage boat collection, which includes carpentry, metalwork, caulking, rigging, riveting and painting, to helping out at La Faîs’sie d’Cidre at Hamptonne. Other opportunities include scanning images, cataloguing and inputting on to a database or typing the contents of Visitor Comments Books; demonstrating lace-making; playing music to entertain visitors; research for special projects, exhibitions and publications; cleaning objects from the collections for display (under the supervision and watchful eye of the conservator of course); gardening and site maintenance; drawing illustrations for maps and publications. 

Some people volunteer on a regular basis, for example giving a couple of hours on the same day each week, every week, but there are also opportunities to help on one-off projects or specific occasions either at Jersey Heritage sites or outside events. 

There are more than 200 names on the Jersey Heritage volunteer database with about 300 active at different times throughout the year and on 1^st June they are invited to Jersey Museum for a social evening and behind the scenes tours as a thank you for their work and contribution to Jersey Heritage.

Tours will include Registrar Val Nelson doing a show and tell in the Ouless Room of “star items” from the Jersey Heritage textile collection and the Coin Hoard Crew taking volunteers into the Laboratory to have a close look at the treasure and the work they are doing. Volunteers will also be invited to look around the Merchants House and this year’s exhibitions celebrating 125 years of the Jersey Evening Post photographs and the French surrealist sisters Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

Other events organised include a lunch-time pop in session at Jersey Museum on tomorrow from midday for anyone interested in becoming a volunteer. Staff and volunteers will be on hand to give information and answer queries. Jersey Heritage is keen to recruit more Site Guides and Visitor Hosts during the busy summer months, for which full training is given.