3.6 billion seconds and rising!

3.6 billion seconds a year, 61 million minutes a year count it how you like 2010/11 was a really great year for volunteering at the RSPB.  Why? Because our volunteers gave the RSPB a gift of time of over 1 million hours.  Yes you read that right, 1 million hours in one single year for the first time ever – what a truly fantastic achievement!  Whether you gave us a gift of time of 5 minutes or volunteered full time - thank you. 

We've come a really long way since those ladies in Didsbury, volunteers themselves, started the RSPB way back in 1889 fighting the use of egret feathers in ladies hats.  Even then the RSPB was a campaigning organisation with people donating their time and talents to the cause.  Those ladies would no doubt be extremely proud to know their legacy lives on as the organisation they founded now enjoys the support of over 17,000 regular volunteers, who like them, want to step up and save nature.  And what a contribution our volunteers, people like you and me, make each year.  One million hours equates to an extra 591 full time staff, 12 people spending their entire working life with the RSPB or one person volunteering 24 hours a day 365 days a year for a 116 years!

Volunteers are involved in almost every aspect of the RSPB's work from volunteer wardens on reserves to undertaking surveys of farmland birds, raising money in the local community to repairing and recycling binoculars for use by our Birdlife partners across the globe. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways volunteers support and enhance our work. 

You name it volunteers are doing it with and for the RSPB right now across all of our work, in the UK and internationally.  We have doctors, translators, IT specialists, health and safety experts, carpenters, quantity surveyors and even a burlesque dancer (don't ask) all donating their time and talents to the RSPB. 

There is a Greek proverb that for me really sums up what volunteering with the RSPB is all about and why people want to step up for nature with us and it simply says:

'A civilisation flourishes when people plant trees under which they will never sit'

Volunteering really is flourishing in the RSPB and here's to the next million.

If you’d like to know more about how your time and talents could help save nature check out the volunteering pages of our website at www.rspb.org.uk/volunteering