Weaving Us Together

Thursday 1^st June marks the start of this year’s Volunteers’ Week – an annual celebration of the fantastic contribution that volunteers make to communities and organisations across the UK. And closer to home it’s a chance to recognise the huge role that volunteers play at FC United, not only on match days but in the general day to day running of our football club. So over the next few days we’ll take a look at some of the roles performed by volunteers across the club.

The theme of this year’s Volunteers’ Week is how ‘volunteering weaves us together’ and that’s something we’re familiar with at FC. Volunteers give so much to this football club – time, energy, commitment, skills and expertise – and the committee structure introduced last year provides a wonderful example of co-owners coming together to help our football club.

A paper published by Supporters Direct a few years ago highlighted the key role that volunteering plays in community-owned sports clubs like FC United and spoke of how tapping into a multitude of skills amongst the supporter base can offer a ‘business advantage’ to a club.

It’s difficult to measure the ‘value’ of volunteering to FC United but over the last year or so we’ve been trying to do just that – by asking our volunteers to sign in and out on match days so their working hours can be recorded and also requesting that other volunteers send us their monthly hours so that they can be logged too.  

In the first ten months of 2022-23, from June 2022 to April 2023, 191 volunteers have worked a total of 11,086 hours across a whole host of jobs at FC United including: supporting staff in the office with administrative tasks; working in the club shop; operating the turnstiles; selling Pound for the Ground draw tickets; helping out with various tasks around the ground during the week so that it looks its best on match days; organising and hosting Course You Can Malcolm; maintaining the club’s website; pulling pints; picking litter; running the club’s various communications channels; participating in the club’s committees; writing articles for the website and programme; assisting in the preparation of the club’s annual business plan and budget; and many more. Not to mention the board itself – it’s easy to forget that board members are volunteers too.

Much of our volunteering effort takes place quietly behind the scenes with little or no fanfare and that’s the way that many prefer to keep it - jobs done, and done well, with a quiet sense of pride, for the cause not the applause.

And in the process of helping out our football club these volunteers have saved the club an estimated £223,868 in the first ten months of the current financial year. It’s a tremendous collective effort which is crucial to the club’s long-term survival particularly when we consider that without our volunteers doing all this work for free the club’s annual wage bill would increase by more than one-third – which would plainly not be sustainable in the current economic climate.    

Unlike many football clubs who are heavily reliant on wealthy individuals, the success of this thing of ours is built on a phenomenal collective effort. It’s not down to a single individual or the board or management team to drive us forward - it’s about every single one of us pulling together and doing our bit to help the club. It’s our club and it’s up to all of us to cherish it and ensure that it not only survives but thrives in years to come. Volunteering, in any form whether it’s on a match day or not, is a crucial part of that.

Des Gallagher, who helps out in the office at Broadhurst Park, describes what volunteering for the club means to him: “FC United has given me some great memories and I feel I need to repay the club for that. To own your own football club and volunteer for it is tremendously rewarding and I’d recommend volunteering to anyone”.

We recognise however that we’re living through tough economic times at the moment and not everyone will have much spare time for volunteering. A recent report by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) found that the proportion of people in the UK who have volunteered in the last twelve months has declined from 16% in 2018 to 13% in 2022 as some people reported that they had got out of the habit of volunteering during the pandemic and not returned to it whilst others, striving to make ends meet during the cost of living crisis, said that they simply had less spare time for volunteering. And inevitably we’ve seen some evidence of this at FC.

Nevertheless if you can offer any help on match days or with numerous other tasks across the club then please contact Laura Bagley, our Volunteer Coordinator (who is herself a volunteer), by emailing laura.bagley@fc-utd.uk or calling the office on 0161 7692005. Even if you live nowhere near the club but have skills and time to offer (even if it’s only a few hours here and there) then please get in touch as there may be opportunities for you to get involved too. You can also take a look at the current volunteering opportunities at FC United by visiting the volunteering page on the club’s website here.

Thank you to all our volunteers!