Reach helps build teams with specific skillsets

East London Waterworks Park (ELWP) was formed in 2019 to campaign to buy 14 acres of land in East London and turn it into a community-owned, biodiverse park with wild swimming pools and community spaces. The charity is entirely run by volunteers and has already successfully raised over £2 million towards the purchase of the land, driven by a commitment to promote conservation and preserve and improve the physical and natural environment for the benefit of the local community.  

The organisation has well-developed designs and plans for the site which have been drawn up by volunteers working in circles, each of which has its own workstream. Nathan Miller, one of the volunteer Directors of ELWP, tells us how he has used Reach Volunteering to recruit teams of expertise to grow the organisation’s capacity and move it closer towards its goals.  

“As an organisation with around 350 volunteers working across all our activities, we use a number of different platforms to recruit our volunteers. We’ve found that Reach Volunteering really comes into its own when we need to build up a team with a specific skillset to lead and deliver an important project.   

“One project that we’re really excited about centres around inclusivity. We know how important it is to ensure that we listen to everyone’s views about the creation of environmental spaces, so we’ve made it a focus to talk to people from backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in environmental projects.  

“Our aim is to publish the results of our research in a report so that, in addition to improving the design of the park, it has an impact on the wider built environment sector. We’d like to showcase through the report how people from backgrounds that aren’t usually asked these questions, want green spaces to be made more welcoming and inclusive.  

“To achieve this wider impact, we know that the visual design of the report will be important so we posted a volunteer opportunity for artists and illustrators to join the team to help with this. Reach has definitely been the best platform for recruiting to this role.  

“The volunteers we’ve engaged through Reach have been particularly active and committed and we’re delighted that we now have 18 pieces of art created in the last few months ready to amplify the voices of marginalised people who are rarely asked how they would like spaces to be designed.  

“This is real tangible work done by volunteers from Reach that will do important things, not just for us, but for the wider sector.  

Recruiting specialists in user experience research and design  

“In November 2024 we identified a need for more people with a user experience design and research background to help us move a number of different projects forwards. One project that we’d been wanting to focus on for a couple of years was looking at the volunteer experience.  

“As volunteers make up our entire workforce, we knew how important it was to make sure that the whole experience of working with us was as positive as possible, but we suspected that it was not as smooth as it could be in certain areas.  

“We needed people with experience in user research to pull together an accurate picture of the current situation and work with us to design a more consistent and effective experience for our volunteers.  

“I advertised an opportunity in User Experience Research for an Environmental Charity on Reach at the end of November and by the middle of January we’d had a phenomenal response with around 40 applications. 

“As a result we’ve been able to bring in a team of around 20 User Experience Researchers to work on this project, exponentially increasing our capacity to complete a project which could be pivotal for our ongoing success that we’d been struggling even to start before. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without Reach Volunteering.  

“What’s more, the scale of the response to the opportunity on Reach has enabled us to bring capacity to other projects too.  

“One example is the creation of online resources for schools. Although we’ve always been keen to share our activities and learnings around inclusive design in the education field, it has always been a bit ad hoc before. The capacity that the user researchers and designers are now offering is enabling us to pull this together and our plan is to transform it into a co-ordinated resources platform that will enable teachers across the country to take these resources and deliver them anywhere.  

“So, not only have the volunteers recruited through Reach expanded capacity within our project work, but they are also opening up new possibilities and opportunities for wider engagement which in turn will further expand capacity. It’s such a powerful thing.”

Volunteers choose how they want to be involved

“We’re very open to people coming on board and getting involved in projects that interest them. And if people have the capability and desire to lead things, then the opportunity is there to do this and create a team around you to deliver a piece of work that is really needed.  

“When Yara responded to the User Research opportunity, she came in and wanted to know where she could best help. She was really proactive about coming along to meetings and reading documents to help her understand where we were with the campaign overall. She quickly picked up that one project that was needed but didn’t really have any resource was to create a new and more effective website for ELWP.  

“Yara took the initiative and has begun building a team of volunteers around her to deliver this much-needed website project.  

“So even in such a short space of time, we’re already seeing that the user researchers are greatly improving our capacity in ways that we’ve wanted to for years but just wasn’t been possible before we were able to tap into the incredible reach of Reach.  

“Being able to find volunteers with such specific expertise has been transformational for East London Waterworks Park. The capacity they are providing is fuelling our growth in ways we didn’t anticipate but are very excited about.”