Volunteering to lead sessions
Over several years, as part of our wider learning and community programmes on Hampstead Heath, we have been developing the role of our volunteer Session Leaders and, in this blog post, we are highlighting the amazing work they do on our green spaces!
A group of our Session Leaders welcoming a local school outside our base, the Hive.
We have a stupendous team of around eight volunteers who work alongside our staff team to help deliver youth, community and school sessions on Hampstead Heath. They get involved in a whole range of activities, including planning sessions, helping us welcome groups and providing extra support to our youngest visitors and those who may have additional needs.
Volunteer and staff run an engagement session at a local secondary school
One of our Session Leaders guiding primary school children
Our volunteer Session Leaders are an essential part of the team at Heath Hands, enabling us to deliver our activities to inspire and connect people of all ages and abilities to nature. They also help immensely with planning activities, and helping with evaluation and pos-session clear up!
Our volunteers provide us with extra resource to deliver high quality sessions for visiting groups, giving us enough capacity to pay everyone enough attention and to divide larger groups into smaller sub-groups to get up-close with nature and wildlife. Our volunteers play a particularly key role in helping us run our weekend youth volunteering sessions, ensuring that we have adequate trained supervisors for our teenage volunteers.
Supervising youth volunteers planting bulbs
Volunteering provides an opportunity for our team to gain additional skills in group supervision and in an outdoor educational setting, which may in turn benefit them in their development or help them gain skills for potential future roles or employment. Providing these varied development opportunities alongside our other volunteering programmes and work experience is a key part of our aim to provide pathways to employment in the environmental sector.
In addition, session leader volunteers, as well as helping with supervising any young visitors, often get stuck into any activities alongside them, bringing an intergenerational dimension to our projects, which plays a role in fostering community cohesion.
Preparing for the annual Conker Championships
Anyone interested in volunteering as a Session Leader can find out more here, or if group leading is of interest, we also welcome volunteer Walk Leaders to help support our health walk programmes.
