Before you decide if you want to volunteer with us, we’d like to tell you a bit more about what you can expect. We work across Scotland and have around 800 volunteers supporting us with by sharing their food, farming and countryside knowledge.

As we work with schools, our volunteering opportunities are within the 9am – 3.30pm schools day from Monday through to Friday. Your main point of contact will be your local coordinator. If your looking for a social volunteering experience our events opportunities deliver. Our host and speak opportunities often involve volunteering as an individual so are more about sharing knowledge than interacting with others.

Our volunteers come from all walks of life, but the majority of them have a farming background. We have a variety of different opportunities for volunteers:

• Hosts – these are farmers/landowners that volunteer by working with us to open their farm for a school visit. How often they do this is up to them and we support them with ensuring their farm is safe.
• Speakers – we deliver lots of sessions in schools and online and have some fantastic enthusiastic speakers who help us by delivering talks. Again, how many talks you deliver is down to you!
• Events – we run a range of different bigger events for schools like food and farming days. These events bring together many providers and give school groups a great insight to the industry. There are a wide range of volunteer opportunities at these events from guiding groups round and keeping them to time (good time keeping required) to delivering a session as part of the event.  

If you want to get more involved with the running of the organisation, there are opportunities to join local committees (usually meet weekday evenings and provide support to the local network). The time commitment for a committee is around 2 days a month, spread into smaller chunks of time. You could also volunteer with the board (weekday meetings and ongoing support) equating to around 5 days a month. 

Your local coordinator will catch up with you for a cuppa and you can ask us any questions you might have. We ask all volunteers to complete a volunteering form and the protecting vulnerable groups (PVG) form. We can help you complete these when we meet you.