What Next - How to Volunteer

Immediately our appeal is for sets of volunteers of two types …

Advocates

Between now & until the summer (2026) the advocates & enthusiasts representing each aspect of Village_Life to ‘profile’ their work and possible needs/ambitions over the next 20 years. This is relatively straightforward and in many cases is obvious or already covered - such as the bowls club or church wardens. There may be associations you participate in where you can lead or help develop the profile over the next few months. Or there may be ideas you have - on building styles for example or a new initiative such as a nature walk you want to put on the list. The material produced by this exercise will be collated as a web directory as well as providing some of the source material for the Neighbourhood Plan.

Core Team

From summer 2026 - summer 2027 we will require a ‘core’ team to sift, sort and structure all of the profiles from the advocates, turn these into meaningful choices and run the consultation / exhibitions / meetings for all Meldreth residents. This is trickier, involves more work than the advocates and will call on some specialist skills - in social media, survey design, planning, architecture etc. I intend to use any self-identified volunteers for this, plus direct appeals for any specific shortages ( “anyone know an architect type of thing”). It is also an excellent opportunity for a school college project or intern for 6 or 12 months.

Where you can fit?

If you are an advocate please start thinking, talking to people to see if they are interested and wait for the next steps (we will send pro-formas out via the Parish office to known associations but will struggle with nascent ideas or non-established interests such as my example of architecture). We will also be using Meldreth Matters and Facebook as channels for these requests and announcements.

If you think you can contribute to the core team please come forward as soon as you can, there is an amount of pre-work especially reading and planning to be done although the main activities and work will only start in the summer once the profiles are in. Similarly spreading the word of what we are trying to do will help at any time.

Contact Roger James (roger@rogerjames.net) to register your interest.