The Heart of ChoirBLAST ❤️ : Powered by People

Written by Tom Stottor, Lead Volunteer Co-Ordinator

ChoirBLAST is community. It’s the heart of everything that we do, from the yearly festival (what a day! I’m still recovering …) to the six (more incoming!) weekly choirs that we run. 

But behind all of that is another community: our volunteers, who make it all possible. Since February, I have had the pleasure of working with our volunteers as the Lead Volunteer Co-ordinator. This means that I am responsible for making sure that everyone is in the right places at the right times – and most of all that they are happy and confident and comfortable while doing so. 

I volunteered to do this (yes, me too - we really are all volunteers!) because I wanted to be part of something bigger; something local and something positive. This was my first time as a regular volunteer, and while I was sure there would be a sizable satisfaction in giving back and helping out, I’ve been struck by how much I’ve gotten back from it along the way. 

Volunteering is:

• Local: It’s easy to feel disconnected from the places we live in, thanks to the  dreary daily news cycle and the world’s ever-multiplying digital distractions. Not so with volunteering, with is real, tangible and all terra firma: thanks to ChoirBLAST, I know Godalming, and why it’s a super place to live, in all new ways. 

• A great way to meet people: Best about knowing about where you live is knowing people that live there: I’ve made some great new friends over the last six months, and, with 150 volunteers for ChoirBLAST across the year, the odds of finding your people are very high!

• Accessible and flexible: There’s a role for everyone! We all have our own priorities and lives bubbling away in the background and we all have different life experiences. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to be a volunteer, no minimum time commitments, and there are more ways to be involved than space for words on this page. 

• Fun: Working hard or hardly working? Who knew that choosing to do something, on your own terms and in a way that suits you, with a brilliant bunch of fellow volunteers, and on the road to bringing the joy of choirs to as many new people as possible … would be a great way to spend time?

So I am, as I suspected, proud to have been part of a super ChoirBLAST festival on 13 June … but it’s the journey that got me there that has been the best part. I fear that I might be getting more from ChoirBLAST than I’m giving back, but I think that’s volunteering in a nutshell. 

PS: If this sounds fine and you’d like to volunteer for ChoirBLAST … we’d love that!