Volunteer

The Gatehouse has only one full-time and three part-time salaried staff, so all of our work is highly dependent on a large base of volunteers. Our volunteers come from a wide range of different backgrounds: Who volunteers ?

We are open from 5pm to 7pm Tuesday to Saturday and 3pm to 5pm on Sundays. We prefer most volunteers to arrive 30 minutes before the session starts and to stay on until the clearing-up has been completed (around 15 minutes). If you can only come for part of a session, please still get in touch as all help is most welcome.

The most important thing we ask of our volunteers is that they are reliable. It is much easier to provide a dependable and useful service to our guests if we know that the volunteers on our list will all turn up on time. If you are due to come and find out you can't, please do ring to let us know - even if it is shortly before we are due to open, we can sometimes find a replacement at the last minute.

The majority of our volunteers come for a single session once a week or once a fortnight. Many are students who only come in termtime. We welcome people who are only in Oxford for a couple of months on courses. It is also particularly useful if local people can help out in the summer and other holidays when the lack of students poses a problem for us.

The best way to find out more about what it is like to volunteer is to come to a session. Please get in touch and we will arrange this. We give inductions to all new volunteers and there are various training events to help people who volunteer at The Gatehouse (such as how to deal with violence).

We are also keen to encourage people to volunteer in other ways; clearly our opening hours prevent many people who work normal hours from helping out during the sessions. If you have any ideas on how you might be able to help us, please contact us; we need people to fundraise, deliver letters and posters, make food, and undertake other projects - we are flexible so if you have any ideas of other ways you could help, please let us know.

If you would like to help, you can contact us on 01865-792999 leaving your name, contact details and which day(s) suit you. Alternatively, e-mail us on volunteer@oxfordgatehouse.org. And do let us know if there is more information we can provide on the website: webmaster@oxfordgatehouse.org.