Most Asked: Amanda Elmes, Learning, Outreach and Volunteer Lead for the South Downs National Park

March 28, 2018

I’m a young person looking for volunteer opportunities. What do you have to offer?

We want young people to feel that they can make a difference in their National Park and are opening up more volunteer opportunities for young people through the National Citizen Service (NCS) as part of wider work by National Parks UK. This is very new for us, we only introduced it last year. Sign up to the NCS online to find your local provider and look for programmes running here in the South Downs.

I can’t undertake physical work, how can I volunteer for the National Park?

There are lots of different ways that you can support the South Downs and many are open to people with access issues. We’ve identified 170 different organisations whose volunteers help to promote the National Park’s purposes and you can find them on our volunteering map

What does the Outreach part of your role cover?

This is literally ‘reaching out’ to under-represented groups. People who aren’t able to benefit from all the amazing things the South Downs has to offer. This might be because they don’t feel that the National Park is something that they’d enjoy, that it’s a place for ‘other’ people go to or because getting here is just that bit more difficult than for others.

These groups we’re targeting include young people aged 16 to 24, people with disabilities, people who are socially disadvantaged and BAME communities. Part of my job is to see how we can put together projects that encourage more people to see the National Park as a place that belongs to them too.

There are some areas of high deprivation right on the National Park’s doorstep. We have a travel grant available to schools within 5km of our border where more than 10% of children receive free school meals and about a third of schools in this area are eligible. More than 2,500 children are now visiting the South Downs every year because of the grant. It’s always oversubscribed so we’re looking for ways to fund it.

What are you doing to support teachers?

We want to support teachers to use the National Park to bring their lessons to life – not just in obvious subjects like geography but across the whole curriculum. There are lots of resources on our learning zone and we’ve created a special South Downs curriculum by taking the national curriculum and annotating it to show opportunities to use the National Park to teach it. Our learning map will help you find providers within the National Park and our travel grant scheme (see above) can help get your class there.

Our flagship event is the Schools Conference which this year we expanded to include senior leadership and governors to support and encourage a whole school approach to learning outside the classroom.