Volunteer Life at Imagination Station is a thrilling, bumpy, ultimately rewarding, roller coaster experience. Our team is ever changing, as is our environment, but what remains constant is the essence of our team, their willingness to serve and diligence in doing so. We have some top tips on working with volunteers and building a strong team.
Introducing: Volunteer Life page
Whether you’ve built in our play area, been to a birthday party or class at Imagination Station, or simply scrolled through our social media, you may have spotted one of our Volunteers in a bright Imagination Station shirt. In case you haven't, we wanted to showcase some of our awesome people, so we've created a brand new Volunteer Life page on our website.
Our volunteers have weathered all the seasons of Imagination Station. When you look back on their journey you’ll get a snippet of both the ordinary and spectacular things our volunteers get up to. We’ve seen the remarkable people we work with achieve amazing things over the years. Their growth and change is most obvious in the changing of facial hair and hairstyles, but deep down - and most importantly - we see incredible growth in their skills and character. We’ve had people come in with little experience, but through their time here they become better equipped and are able to take on bigger and better opportunities.
How we build our brilliant team
Quality over quantity
When volunteers first sign up, we want to make sure they’re a great fit for our organisation, so we sit down with them and discuss what their journey will look like, and how we can help them achieve their personal goals. We believe prioritising your company or organisation’s values from the get go when adding more people to your team is important. Though having many hands are great, people that are going to improve the quality of your service and delivery of your mission will always be better in the long run. Fortunately we have found many volunteers who add quality to our team and we are grateful to work with them!
Be willing to invest in them
We want to equip our volunteers well, not just for this role, but any future role they want to take on in life, and we believe our training programme does just that. Training is a time to ask for help, make and learn from mistakes, work in a team and practice taking the initiative. No one is perfect from the start, but after completing their training we see all our volunteers use their initiative, embody our values, and help others.
When you’re working with a group of volunteers, there are going to be ups and downs, things that are out of your control and moments you just have to hold on tight. Changes in schedules and availability, learning curves, personality clashes, and lately, pandemics and lockdowns, are a few of our biggest challenges. What is most important when working with volunteers is remembering that people are important, and it’s more rewarding to experience the journey together.
Celebrate!
We love to celebrate whenever we get the chance at our volunteer nights! There’s always LEGO and food for the wonderful volunteers. This is a time we get to see everyone’s faces in one go rather than during their different shifts throughout the week. We believe these gatherings are a great opportunity to upskill our team in a specific area whether it be customer service, how to be helpful with activities like birthday parties, or team building. These events help allow our volunteers to connect with each other further.
The incredible LEGO builds and extraordinary displays of creativity from our passionate team are countless. This definitely feels like a bonus on top of their excellent customer service! We love seeing the designs and structures our in-house LEGO Masters build, which then inspire and excite our customers of all ages to build their own, try out something new and participate in creative play.
If you’re interested in finding out more of what our Volunteers get up to, head over to our Volunteer Life page!