Our Volunteer Guide
Hello and thank you for taking the time to read this guide.
The ambition for 100rural years is quite challenging, and we’ll only manage to achieve it with your help!
There are four main areas where help is needed:
- Writing personal anecdotes and gathering anecdotes from others
- The Rural Community Historians archive works
- Story Telling – from the ‘proposed stories list‘ and for the ‘Network Member’ (né RCC) pages
- Alumni – growing the alumni network and channelling content through to the archive and web teams.
That’s where most of the work is (and more on this in a minute) but we also need any copies of old documents (so many things have been lost in the midsts of time!) and most importantly any and all personal recollections and anecdotes relating to RCC works over the years.
If it all looks too complex, or too time consuming, and all you are able to offer is some of those anecdotes then please do – these are really important to ensure that the site truly recognises and celebrates the people and the works of the RCC movement.
To get an idea of the stories we will be writing (and maybe jogging memories of anecdotes) you can see a list on our Story List page.
Volunteering Anecdotes
It is vitally important that anecdotes are authentic – so that the website represents the voices of this incredible network of people.
That means they are published as received – providing they fulfil the purpose of an anecdote; which is to bring to the website the personal impact of the events, works and people of our rural community movement.
A ‘good’ anecdote (for the website) will clearly relate to either the works of a Network Member, or the concerns discussed within our stories.
Anecdotes, we hope, will naturally fulfil our purpose to celebrate people; sometimes people who will not be able to speak for themselves – they will be intimate yet sensitive to the fact that the website is a publication platform. We should ensure that internet search results for any person mentioned, are a result that best honours that person, their life and their work.
Volunteering in the Rural Community Historians Team
As a volunteer team we share our work according to
- The time that our volunteers have
- Their specific skills and experiences
- Their interest in the work
There are 3 main roles in the work that we do, where you can help:
- The Rural Community Historian: writing the main stories on the site (like our first story, The history of Village Halls)
- The Rural Community Archivist: helping to log new (well newly found) materials into appropriate archives, and ensuring all archived materials are well documented (so they can actually be found and be of use).
- The Partner Archive Managers: liaising with other archives where we don’t directly deposit materials, but where there is information of great historical relevance to our own work.
What We Need From Our Story Tellers
You can get a good idea of the stories we want from the Village Halls story, and also from The Story Guide.
But we don’t just want to tell the history of RCC work over the years, we also want to celebrate the specific successes of the individual organisations. For example, take a look at our Tees Valley Rural Action page. Our volunteer Network Alumni Historians write these stories of success – ideally with a degree of personal experience.
The Alumni Work
If the foregoing sounds like just more than you are able to commit to, we completely understand – all of our volunteers are exceptionally time-poor! And in recognition of that, we are hoping to recruit Network Alumni volunteers. People who can take over the conversations with our wider group; receive documents and pass them on to the right person, draw out the anecdotes and ensure we make the best use of all the bits and pieces that come our way.
But in so doing to also help establish and grow our alumni network, including managing and creating our alumni channels (a regular newsletter would be a great boon).
In Conclusion
All of the foregoing is really an attempt to make clear the scope of works we are facing. Obviously it is tremendously helpful if people can step in and take such roles on-board, but we understand the difficulty in making such commitments – so we are actually very happy to hear from you even if you feel you can only commit to some of the tasks of some of the roles.
We hope you find something in all of this where you feel ‘I absolutely know what is needed there…’, because it is personal knowledge and experience that really underpins what we need from our volunteers.
With Our Kind Regards
The 100 Rural Years Team