In this blog, volunteer Mike Babb shares why a proper welfare unit isn’t a luxury for our volunteers – it’s essential. Each volunteer has their own preference for what they need from a welfare unit, whether it be heating, the ability to dry their wet clothes or have a hot drink. Read on to find out why our appeal is vital.
If you were to ask our volunteers what welfare facilities were important to us, we would probably give you different answers.
- For our volunteer who rides in by bike from Rugeley it’s a drying room, so his wet clothes are dry for his ride home.
- For the one who travels the furthest, it’s a place to change for his three-hour journey home.
- One of our most local volunteers values hand washing facilities with hot water.
- Whereas for me it’s probably heating, so I can get warm again, as I suffer from Reynards in cold weather.
- Several volunteers, including the one who arrives by bus, values a kettle to make a cup of tea so that he doesn’t have to bring a flask with him every day.
All of those facilities should be provided on a construction site, but I’m afraid that we have done without most of them for as long as I’ve been volunteering. We do get a toilet and more recently that’s been replaced with a new one.
At the end of the day though, when we are trying to finish a particular job off, we all seem to value battery charging facilities for our power tools. There’s nothing worse than when all the batteries are flat in late afternoon and we are not able to finish a particular job off, until someone takes the batteries home to recharge them, or we run our site generator.
So, it’s been wonderful over the last few weeks, as the Trust has hired in a welfare unit. It’s on trial at the moment as we would like to purchase three second hand units for our main work sites.
This one is fully environmentally friendly though. We’ve had it for a few weeks now and its solar-powered system has met all of the service needs. The solar power has both heated and pumped the water for handwashing, boiled numerous kettles, charged several power tool batteries and operated the heating to both the main area and the separate drying room. This unit also has grey water recovery, so it catches the rainwater from the roof, uses it for handwashing and then flushes the toilet with the used water.
It’s only the internal layout that we would change (the fixed tables don’t quite work for us) but we can’t do anything about that, because this one is hired and we don’t actually own it.
We aren’t looking for a unit as good as this (although it would ne nice) but we would like to be a bit more environmentally friendly than we are now and also be able to comply with the Construction Design and Management Regulations (CDM), which sets the minimum requirements.
Having this unit on site has shown us just how much difference the right facilities can make to a day’s volunteering. With your help, we can make this level of welfare a permanent part of our work sites.
Mike Babb
Workparty Volunteer
Phase 2
