Helping Hands is a brand new volunteering project for Cumbria, that places individual needs at the heart of the volunteering experience.
Anti Racist Cumbria are one of 45 partners working with Helping Hands to improve people’s access to exciting volunteer opportunities within arts and heritage organisations across Cumbria.
Helping Hands will support individuals to access exciting opportunities to help out within arts and heritage organisations across Cumbria. Whether people are looking to have fun, enhance their skills, start a new career or meet new people, Helping Hands will get people there with 1-2-1 support and volunteer opportunities shaped around their needs.
This model is refreshing and evidences the importance of working with grassroots organisations. We’ve been working with Helping Hands alongside other great community partners to help them recognise, understand and ultimately remove the barriers that prevent people from volunteering. Through this a new way of volunteering is being created that equitably supports individuals to volunteer for cultural organisations and upskills organisations so they are better prepared to genuinely include volunteers from diverse backgrounds. This will mean participating organisations being supported in a range of intersectional approaches including moving towards an anti-racist mindset too.
For too long, Black, Brown and racially minoritised communities and ergo staff and volunteers have been labelled as ‘hard to reach’. This ignores that there has been no trust built, understanding of barriers, investment of time, money or genuine effort put into actually reach us! We’re hopeful this new approach proves that the one-size fits all approach tends to mean getting ‘one-size’ of people.
It’s great to see our cultural sector modelling an alternative and equitable example to the rest of Cumbria.
If you want to see more gigs, enjoy art, theatre, comedy, museums and more, give lend and hand and learn new skills then…
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sign up to their monthly newsletter
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book a 1-2-1 with one of their Volunteer Leads… who are on hand to help you on your volunteering journey.
