Volunteer FAQ
Volunteering – your questions answered
If we haven’t answered your question here, drop an email to volunteersupport@wexp.org.uk and we’ll do our best to answer it.
Trips happen throughout the whole year so there are always things to do. Whether you choose to get involved in admin, crewing or maintenance you can always be busy!
Many of our volunteers belong to more than one team – you can have an admin role or be part of the maintenance team and crew our boats for example. You can volunteer for as many roles as suits your lifestyle (and you can sensibly carry out). At the moment we particularly need volunteers for admin and management roles.
Wednesday mornings are an important focus of both indoor and outdoor work for the maintenance team and finish with a sociable hot lunch, cooked of course by our wonderful volunteer chef! The base is open on other days too, depending on when boats are booked out for trips and when groups of volunteers arrange meetings and working parties.
Each year we have an ‘end of season’ get together for all volunteers (partners welcome for a nominal charge). This is held locally in the autumn when the busy summer season is over.
For all volunteering roles access to emails is essential as we lack the capacity to offer off-line options. All our documents are stored on Google Drive so knowledge of Drive would be a bonus for admin roles. Don’t worry though, you will be given the necessary support until you are quite comfortable with Drive.
Our Headquarters is the Nash Mills boat base, just off Red Lion Lane. We don’t have an office that’s open every day, but depend on volunteers with desk-based roles to work independently from their own homes at times that suit them, using their own technology to access our Google Drive and apps for emails and documents etc. All the while, there’s strong support from colleagues at the end of a phone or online.
We are an all-volunteer charity with no paid employees. We depend 100% on the willingness and commitment of local people to get involved in running and managing Waterways Experiences – crewing our boats, maintaining the boat base and administration to ensure the smooth operation of our services.
Your time commitment is agreed with your Team Leader. If you are interested in volunteering as Boat Crew, we would expect you to take part in a minimum of five trips each year.
No previous experience of canal boating is necessary but you must be physically fit and reasonably agile and strong. Some of our Grand Union Canal lock gates take some pushing to open and close! We provide ongoing training so that all our volunteers work ‘The WExp Way’.
We pay reasonable expenses where work involves travel to the boat base.