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Thank you to our volunteers!



Thank you to our volunteers!

May 29, 2015

The first week of June is Volunteers Week 2015 – created as an opportunity to say thank you to volunteers across the country for the contribution that they make. More than 15m people volunteer in the UK every month lending their time and talents to a wide variety of causes and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) estimate that between 2012 and 2013 volunteering contributed an estimated £23.9bn to the UK economy.

We’re very lucky to have our own ‘army’ of 530 volunteers – the South Downs Volunteer Ranger Service – 350 of whom take part in our regular volunteer program and a further 180 dedicated specifically to our Secrets of the High Woods Project. In the year from April 2014 to March 2015 they gave up a phenomenal 5,760 days of their time completing 937 tasks.

So what does being a South Downs Volunteer Ranger involve? Tasks vary from season to season so here are just a sample of what they’ve been up to over the past year: