Yorkshire Wildlife Trust are recruiting a crack team of enthusiastic volunteers passionate about nature to help mobilise communities right across Yorkshire and make our county a better place for wildlife. These #TeamWilder community champion volunteers will play a leading role in engaging, inspiring, and coordinating their local communities, enabling more people to make more of a difference for nature at home, in their community, school or place of work.
Yorkshire’s wildlife is in crisis, with 1 in 7 of our species at risk of extinction or becoming more confined to protected spaces, including hedgehogs and bumblebees. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust want people to come together to bring about its recovery, for example through networks of healthier green spaces and local action. The Trust has therefore formed #TeamWilder to bring passionate Yorkshire folk together to deliver the change we all need to see. This new community organising approach is based on insights from behavioural science, which indicate that if 1 in 4 people are mobilised for a cause, it will achieve the critical mass needed to make enduring societal change.
There are a huge range of actions communities can take, including creating wildflower verges to provide food for insects, digging ponds to provide habitat for frogs, planting native hedgerows, building nest boxes for swifts, or creating hedgehog friendly streets.
Jo Rawson, Community Engagement Manager, says, “Here at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, we know that no matter how hard we work to slow the loss of our natural environment and protect what remains, we will only be able to create a wilder Yorkshire when communities are supported and empowered to make their own positive change for a more sustainable future. We firmly believe that the recovery of nature must not be something which is done to people; it needs to be done by people […] if it’s going to happen at the scale and pace required to make a difference.”
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust are supported by over 800 volunteers who play an incredible role in the work we do from surveying the North Sea coast for whales, dolphins, and porpoises, to checking our livestock, tackling invasive species and inspiring children to begin a life-long love of wildlife.
If you are passionate about transforming places for the benefit of wildlife and people and can inspire others to get involved and act for nature, then our Community Champion volunteer role could be for you. Training, information and ideas will be provided to help you make change in your local community, and we will be encouraging all of our #TeamWilder participants to share ideas and successes with other groups across Yorkshire to create a wave of action!
In addition to the Community Champion role, if you’d love to kick-start the new year by giving your time to help protect Yorkshire’s wildlife then we have lots of volunteering opportunities for you to get stuck into. Roles on offer include:
• Wildlife Ambassador Volunteers, who engage with the public to raise awareness of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust at events.
• Event & Engagement Volunteers, who support our school and family learning programme.
• Practical Conservation Volunteers, who complete maintenance and habitat management tasks to ensure our reserves are great places for wildlife and people.
If you’re interested in volunteering and want to find out more then please visit www.ywt.org.uk/get-involved/volunteer. You can sign up to and find out more about #TeamWilder at www.ywt.org.uk/team-wilder.
