Recognition of our volunteers at the RAF Museum
Neither of our sites in London or Cosford would be able achieve as much as they do without the 400+ volunteers who generously donate their time and effort.
Volunteers help us in so many areas including preserving the collection and making it accessible to others, cleaning the large and small objects and helping to run our events to name but a few. We are enormously grateful to all these amazing people and always happy to express our appreciation.
On 26 September, the RAF Museum London was honoured to host the London Volunteers in Museums awards (LVMAs) on behalf of the London Heritage Volunteer Managers Network (LHVMN). Our Volunteering Manager Rachel Ball, has been a part of the organising committee for the last four years and was keen to take the opportunity to be the host, in a year of celebration for the Museum.
The evening was hosted amazingly by Rebecca Dalley, our Head of Centenary Programme. Marguerite Jenkin, Director of Finance and Resources at the RAF Museum, welcomed our guests and gave an overview of how our volunteers support the Museum.
Every year we can nominate one person/team for each category; we submitted nominations for four categories out of the seven available. Below is a synopsis of who and why they received their nominations.
Category: Best Team
Collections Care and Conservation team for helping us to clean, conserve, pack, move and install 600 small objects for our three new exhibitions as well as for getting stuck in and sharing their experience and information about what they were doing with our intrigued visitors.
We nominated our Collections Care and Conservation team, who were runners up in the category.
‘I felt very privileged to be there that evening among so many wonderful people’- Natasha Constantinou, a member of the team
Category: Bringing Innovation 
Maryam Karim a member of the ESOL Conversation Café volunteering team attend the awards evening said, ‘It’s so nice to know that someone acknowledges what you do, and your time and effort is appreciated’
Category: Going the Extra Mile
Tim Bracey for championing improving communications about
volunteering and volunteers, for taking part in various open cockpit events, delivering Historic Hendon talks and keeping the day job going – cleaning our aircraft (to name just a few reasons).
Tim was given Highly Commended for his volunteering efforts. Tim said: ‘I was surprised and honoured. I have been very lucky to be able to take part in a wide range of volunteering opportunities, so it was good to be nominated for this category and even better to be highly commended.’
Category: Volunteer Management – Supporting,
Charlotte Goss for developing a new volunteering activity from scratch, providing excellent training and support and embracing what it means to be a Volunteer Line Manager. Charlotte led the scanning digitisation of our Historic Hendon objects for the project.
Charlotte was runner up in this category.
We love being able to recognise our volunteers for doing a fabulous job in their role. If you have had the pleasure of an interaction with our volunteers, and want to share it us please use the hashtag #RAFMVolunteers. Alternatively, if you would like to volunteer at either our London or Cosford sites please visit the Support Us section of our website.
