- Creating a student volunteering webpage – with opportunities for young people
- Advertising through word of mouth using existing students
- Advertising to secondary schools
- Developing small projects that were appropriate to the age of the students and achievable within the time-frame
- Talking to young people to find the sort of projects they would like to be involved in
- Developing projects that involve group work, but also individual tasks
- Allocating time to develop the programme and time to supervise projects and participants
- Designating two days a week for students to come in. We chose 4-5pm on a Thursday and Friday
Specific projects we developed included:
- Developing and curating a student volunteering page on the museum website
- Picking ‘unseen’ objects in the collection, researching these and writing articles for the website and content for social media
- Creating an interactive touchscreen display to be placed in the museum gallery
- Creating a children’s trail
- Developing ideas for family craft activities and making examples
- Made a list of projects that staff members would like to do, but did not have capacity themselves
- Focused on suitable projects that would work within the three to six month time frame for DoE volunteering
- Allocated students to certain projects – depending on existing abilities and skills they wanted to develop
- Produced a weekly timetable for each student, so they knew what they were working on each week (allowing for flexibility!)
- Put students into groups, making sure they were alongside people they could work with
Craft activity devised by students
- Fourteen students have completed DoE through the museum in the last two years
- Nine have stayed on as regular volunteers after completing their award
- Two interactive touchscreens produced for the museum
- Hundreds of social media engagements through posts produced by participants – including developing content for #MusMemeDay, which was far beyond our understanding!
Social media project devised by students
Nicola Trowell
Projects Officer
01380 727369
[email protected]