Volunteer – Ride Bristol

JOIN RIDE BRISTOL

In our early years, we focused on rescuing the 7km of off-road cycle trails in Ashton Court. This combined volunteering and fundraising effort put £120k back into this valuable community asset. We built on this with further fundraising, community building and trail advocacy. Going forward, we want to do even more; to achieve this we need your help to fully resource our small team.

To find out more about any of the roles below, please email chris.l@ridebristol.org.

Fundraising/Corporate Engagement Team

Engagement Volunteer

Sounds kind of fancy, but it isn’t. We get more offers of help than we can properly develop and we would like you to help us change this. This could take a number of forms:

Organise corporate volunteering days (we have run three, which were hugely popular, with one providing an ‘in’ to a successful funding application).
Develop the unexplored potential of existing corporate relationships and follow up on contacts we don’t currently have time to develop.
Using our successful funding applications as the starting point to develop future bids and ‘oven ready’ proposals that can capitalise on funding pots that become available at short notice.

Time Commitment: The Steering Group meets on every third Monday evening of the month. In addition there is a minimum requirement for maybe eight hours a month. However we are all volunteers and flex how much we commit to, depending on the other demands on our time.

Community/Events Team

Community & Events Volunteer

Ride Bristol’s community is its lifeblood. We’re looking to create a great experience for our community, reach more people and give them a reason to keep coming back.

We are looking for someone to help devise a realistic strategy and work with our volunteers to make it happen. Experience in any of the following areas:

Community building.
Creating and planning events.
Community engagement, public speaking and in-person networking.
Building a digital membership organisation.
Community outreach to engage with individuals and organisations to spread the word about, and gather support for, Ride Bristol.
Communications and social media.

Group Ride Volunteer

Ride Bristol currently has the hugely successful Women Ride Bristol group ride and Thursday Ride Out. We’d like to add to this by setting up more all-welcome group rides on Bristol’s trails. We’re looking for someone, or even more than one person, that can set up and coordinate regular group off-road rides. We’re looking for experience in any of the following areas:

Event organisation.
Mountain bike ride organisation.
Route planning.
Communications, promotion and social media.
Good experience riding Bristol’s off-road trails.

Time Commitment: Currently we are running two rides a month (first Saturday during the day and third Thursday evening ride) and we would hope you could typically commit to at least one of these. If you wish to participate, the Steering Group meets on every third Monday evening of the month. We are all volunteers and flex how much we commit to, depending on the other demands on our time.

Communications Team

Photographer and/or Videographer

We’re looking for volunteer content creators, across photo and video, to help us shout about our work. People who can join us at a dig day, group ride or event, capture the story and work with our communications volunteers to get it online. This might be an ongoing gig, or you might just offer your time as a one-off.

We’re mainly shooting for social, but also need images and video for our website.

We’d love to work with someone willing to create short-form video content for Instagram to help us better explain key pieces of information.

We’d also love to work with someone with an interest in creating a longer-form piece of video content to tell the story around Ride Bristol and the Bristol cycling community.

We’re looking for experience in any of the following areas:

Photographer
Videographer
Social media content creator

Time Commitment: We are all volunteers and flex how much we commit to, depending on the other demands on our time. Typically this is around eight hours a month. If you wish to participate, the Steering Group meets on every third Monday evening of the month.

Trailworks Team

Dig Leaders

Maintaining the existing trails is at the core of what we do. It ensures they stay safe and fun to ride. Additionally it helps attract volunteers and donations. It shows we can work in a collaborative and productive manner with landowners and makes us a credible lobbying voice for new trails. We always need extra help, with the advance planning of projects and on the tools leading small groups of volunteers. No previous experience required, you just need to be organised and good with people. If you just want to help ‘hands-on’ with dig days, the time commitment is very much to suit you.

Time Commitment: We are all volunteers and flex how much we commit to, depending on the other demands on our time. Some of our dig leaders will do seven days a year, some only one or two. If you wish to participate on the organisational side of things, the Steering Group meets on every third Monday evening of the month.

Governance/Finance

Health & Safety and/or Safeguarding Volunteer

Dig days, group rides, events, fundraising and more.We need someone to join us to ensure we’re doing everything that we should from a health and safety perspective – to cover all of our volunteer activities. We’re looking to include under 18s in Ride Bristol’s volunteer activities and need a safeguarding policy to ensure everything is done correctly.