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Volunteering is one of the best things you can do at university. When else do you have the vast amounts of unnecessary free time to contribute to anything excluding work and excessive drinking?
Being a history student, or unproductive, unemployable waster- depending on your definition of the term- I find volunteering time at York Treasurers’ House to be a very enjoyable and rewarding experience. Often this presents itself in the most unexpected and bizarre ways.
Firstly though, volunteering offers a great opportunity to meet new and interesting people. The fact that the people who volunteer are doing so out of their own time and free will mean that, really, volunteers are just generally nice people who want to help their community and require no incentive or reward in doing so. You’ll always run into volunteers who are fellow students with similar interests, as well as meeting interesting local people whom you are unlikely to encounter elsewhere in your experiences in York.
However, the things that make volunteering worthwhile for me are the small pleasures that make life interesting and which are often overlooked. Being a room steward in the Treasurers’ House allows you to see people from all walks of life, effectively allowing you to pursue the popular past time of people watching.
Whilst chatting to visitors is part and parcel of what you do, it’s the wonderfully eccentric and intriguing characters that you encounter in the place that make your role most rewarding. As far as I can tell, these individuals don’t seem to exist outside National Trust attractions and jurisdiction.
You wouldn’t notice them in the street or any other environment because there’s no other everyday situation where you’d ever run into them normally or discuss such odd topics with them in conversation. Under what other circumstances would you have a lovely elderly man preach to you the rewards of restoring eighteenth century onyx tables and offer you the name of a bloke in Milton Keynes he knows who ‘could fix it for you’ (as apparently I have direct links to the overlords of the National Trust)? Admittedly I had no idea what he was talking about and was apparently expected to respond with my own, deeply concerned thoughts on the subject. However, it’s nonetheless enjoyable just for the charming absurdity of the situation you find yourself in, with only a folder full of information to rescue yourself.
It’s also a really good way of getting to know the ins and outs of York, be it through the people you meet and work with or by your own aimless wanderings about the city centre on your lunch break. York becomes less of a squeaky clean tourist attraction for you and more about where you work and the places and people you know that others don’t. Humorous little aspects of what you do make it all the more enjoyable: walking past the Minster to go to Treasurers’ House and seeing a nonchalantly held, slowly smouldering cigarette in the cast iron fingers of Constantine the Great reflects the fantastic fun of everyday, normally mundane things and everyone’s relation to them. Similarly bizarre is the fact that if the word ‘Ghost’ is put in front of any normal room or building then suddenly a quite unsurprising cellar is turned into a stunning attraction which brings in vast hordes of tourists who will stare at an uninspiring, empty room for 15 minutes with the expectation of some life changing paranormal experience.
Volunteering and taking part in the wider community changes the way you see where you live, how you relate to it and to some degree the way you live there.
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