Village Residents Volunteer to Keep Community Services Running Independently

Jukin Media

Residents of Trawden, Lancashire, in Britain, have taken it upon themselves to volunteer in running their pub, library, shop, and post office. Out of the village's 2,700 residents, approximately 150 regularly volunteer to help staff these essential amenities. They frequently host community events to interact and entertain among themselves.

Transcript

00:00I'm the post office man, they all call me the postie and I've been doing this for about

00:09four years now at Trodden. This is one of my very favourite outreaches because the people

00:14are all very nice. It's marvellous what the volunteers have done and what everybody have

00:19done to set this up and keep the village alive. I'm the manager of the Trodden Arms,

00:31so the pub's owned by the community. I believe there's 425 shareholders all around that figure

00:37and myself and my wife, we lease it from them and we have been doing so since January 2023.

00:47It's been going swimmingly, it's been going great ever since we took it on. We always

00:53try to make sure we've got enough choice and availability for anybody that wants to come

00:57in whether it's gluten free which is a big thing and alcoholic beer. We've got a range

01:03of 18 different draft products at any one time. So the pub were the final piece of the

01:09puzzle for the community. They bought it last after securing the community centre, the shop,

01:16the library, the post office and all that is solely run by over 120 volunteers. The pub itself

01:24has six volunteers. I'm the volunteer coordinator here at Trodden Forest Community Centre,

01:37library and shop. So I work 25 hours and I'm one of the only people who is employed,

01:44everybody else in the organisation are volunteers, they give up their time for free. We've got the

01:50community centre which is a building that has events on, it has a bar so people can hire the

01:57centre for birthdays and weddings. We've got a mass for weddings and it's used by so many

02:01different community groups and it's run by a board of trustees or volunteers. It takes a lot of

02:08people to keep our assets running, volunteering. We've got about 150 people who volunteer in some

02:15capacity or other to keep everything going. I mean the shop itself needs 68 different people

02:20to do two hours a week just to keep the shop open. That's just serving customers in the shop and

02:26keeping the shelves filled. Behind the scenes obviously there's so many more hours that go on

02:31in terms of accounting, buying, driving, office. It's just an endless list and people give up

02:39their time for that, 150 of us all together.

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