Learn from the best without doing a course: volunteering can offer treasures

Giving your free time to volunteer in the community or as a mentor can have a big impact, and also benefit you in ways you can’t imagine, says John Wyer. Illustration Rosanna Morris

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Published: Wednesday, 06 November 2024 at 07:00 AM

It’s a Saturday morning in the summer of 2000. I’m standing in a huge patch of nettles in a forgotten area in the corner of a public park, holding the ‘stupid end’ of a long measuring tape. I’m not there entirely of my own volition, but there, nonetheless. Just then, a boy, perhaps 11 years old, comes up and asks what I am doing. I can see a second boy hanging back.

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“I’m measuring,” I reply.

He looks at me, as I stand still, holding the end of the tape. We’re both silent for a moment.

“Why?” he asks, not unreasonably.

“Well, we’re going to make a garden here, and before we can do that, we need a plan showing where everything is.”

I can see that he’s not sure about this. This time, warily: “Are you from the council?”

“No, we’re not from the council.”

He brightens again. “Can I help, then?”

Five minutes later, Paul and his friend are busy holding tapes, shouting out measurements, and running back and forth with poles, putting my initial lack of enthusiasm to shame.

Many years on, not only has that garden blossomed and grown into a community resource, but it has sprouted other projects too. There are regular therapeutic horticulture sessions for people with learning disabilities and mental health issues, or simply for those who want to get outside and do some gardening but don’t have a space of their own. There’s a forest school, a teenage project, courses in botanical dyeing, foraging, cooking and a host of other things. And for the first four or five years of that period, Paul and his friend continued to be enthusiastic participants in the garden project – until beer and
girls became slightly more interesting.

There is treasure to be discovered in sharing a career’s worth of knowledge and experience

There are many reasons for getting involved as a volunteer, but for me, this story wraps up a couple of the more important and perhaps altruistic outcomes. The first is the – sometimes surprising – immediate effect. As I stood there reluctantly in the nettles, I was quickly engaged in their enthusiasm, instead of the other way around. Instant gratification. Of course, such outcomes don’t always result. The second is the ripple effect. Those two boys, who knew nothing about gardening, went on to have a lasting connection to what we wanted to create. Paul’s parents came to open days and other events. And for me, even though most of the hard work was done by others, that moment was when I threw my personal pebble in the pond. The ripples are still spreading.

I asked others involved in the project what their most rewarding moments are. The answers included running a volunteer day when you see people turn up, get stuck in and not only enjoy themselves, but also interact with others; and then, at the end of the session, appreciating what they have achieved together and staying to chat over a well-deserved cuppa.

There is another important lesson here – apart from the benefits of the gardening itself. Going there for the gardening and yet enjoying the company of others is a great bonus. It seems so obvious and trite to
say that you can achieve more as a group than on your own, but we all tend to forget this.

For certain people, giving back takes a different shape. For someone who has spent a career accumulating knowledge and experience, there is treasure to be discovered in sharing that with others. This can be through mentoring, lectures, writing or simply giving advice. It reminds me of folk hero and apple farmer Johnny Appleseed, dispensing small seedlings and trees that years later would be great fruiters. Recently, someone told me that a single piece of advice I gave in a lecture about ten years ago changed the way they ran their business. I felt humbled by that, but also happy – this wasn’t some great pearl of wisdom, just something that had worked for me and that I wanted to pass on.

I have always loved designing. However, over the past 20 years or so, I have discovered that I get as much pleasure in coaching others to achieve more than they initially thought they could as I do from completing my own designs. And unexpectedly, in doing so, I learn so much myself.

On Christmas Eve, many years ago, my father trotted out the immortal line familiar to all parents: ‘You get more pleasure from giving presents than receiving them’. That can’t be right, I thought. But of course, as we all know, it turns out to be true.

• John Wyer is an award-winning designer and commentator.