Volunteering

 

Volunteering with us

 Have you thought of volunteering your time to us?

 We are a friendly bunch, happy to help you learn new skills, revive old ones or just generally “lend a hand” for a few mornings a week.  Everyone here is a volunteer and we are from very diverse backgrounds.

So, what could you do?

Education is at our core and we welcome visitors to our centre as well as groups from schools and local societies – we like to give them a personal tour so are always keen to hear from anyone who would like to be one of our guides. For schools we especially like to make the visits fun, interactive and practical.

Most volunteers work in our well-equipped wood working workshop restoring boats or creating new wooden items or restoring old ones – sometimes for fun, sometimes for bespoke commissions.  We all work together learning, chatting and filling our time constructively.

We have our model of the HMS Venerable which still needs a lot of work – so if you have an interest in model making, we’d love to hear from you.

We also have an online media presence – Website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – and are always seeking someone to pop in a couple of hours a week to help us out.  This could be uploading videos, taking photos and putting together a bit of text, making posts, doing updates etc.

We have a couple of rooms we class as our “Library” containing lots of resources – books, DVDs, maps, photos, drawings, magazines – all with a nautical theme which we need to keep tidy, catalogued and accessible for local research projects.

Or maybe you’d like to help us keep our exhibits in tip top condition – a bit of dusting, labelling, cataloguing, researching, displaying etc.

And there are always those mundane admin jobs that need doing

But I don’t know a thing about boats….

And neither do a lot of our volunteers before they arrive – we don’t expect you to be expert wood workers, engineers or historians. It helps – but we have a core group of “experts” ever willing to pass on their knowledge to you and help you along the way. Its all about experiencing new things, being willing to learn and pitch in – be you retired, a DIY-er, educator, in between jobber, student, old sailor or just looking for friendship and company – contact us for a chat. You may even get the opportunity to work on a real live boat – Willdora – or take a trip out on her.

Do contact us on 0191 510 2540 or info@sunderlandmaritimeheritage.org.uk

or fill in the form HERE  and pop it back to us and we’ll be in touch.