At Neuk Collective, volunteering has always been at the heart of how we work. Almost everything we do – from Local Meet‑ups to Body Doubling sessions, Exhibitions and Mentoring – depends on volunteers’ time, energy and creativity. So we’ve been doing a lot of thinking (and unglamorous admin) around what it actually means to volunteer at Neuk, and how we can make it safer, clearer, and more sustainable for everyone who gets involved.
Volunteering, especially in the arts, is a valuable way to build individual skills and support organisations. But, like precious natural organisms, this has to be a symbiotic relationship – we feel very passionately that volunteering should build connection, confidence and skills for the people doing it, as well as help to grow our delivery and reach here at Neuk. For this reason, we now have two (2!) volunteering-focused staff members, Jo and Anna, who are here to support volunteering at Neuk and, more importantly, support the volunteers themselves.
Over the last 6 months, Jo has been working very hard to clarify and secure our volunteering processes and procedures at Neuk. She’s been deep in paperwork creating a volunteering ecosystem that is explicit, relational, and honest about capacity. And of course this ecosystem is designed to be neurodivergent‑friendly from the ground up! We’ve built (and will continue to refine) systems for people who process slowly, or who get overwhelmed by walls of text, or who have very spiky energy. Putting ND beautiful brains first, affects everything from how we write handbooks to how we schedule shifts.
Volunteering with Neuk Collective will always be flexible and volunteer-led – we want to respond to your ideas and energy! This means volunteers are welcome to get involved across almost every strand of our work and can take on ad-hoc roles, or more regular in-depth volunteering. For example, Volunteers Emma and John in Orkney have built a thriving local group with monthly meetups alternating between Stromness and Kirkwall. Their original idea for neurodivergent creative meet-ups in their area directly inspired Neuk Local, our new volunteer-led events programme supported by the Improving Access Fund.
Neuk Local is a good example of this symbiotic volunteering relationship which we hold at our heart. The basic idea is that the staff team – Anna, Amy and Tzipporah – will support the scaffolding of events (risk assessments, early set-up admin, handling payments) and the volunteers will lead all the fun bits (choosing the activity, delivering the event on the ground). Anna has joined us recently in the new role of Neuk Local Coordinator, to specifically support this programme and anyone who volunteers with it. Anna is a neurodivergent theatre director and writer originally from the Highlands and now based in Glasgow. She has worked as a Volunteer Coordinator in the charity sector and has volunteered herself in several arts organisations.
Anna says: “I’m already loving the culture of support and flexibility at Door in the Wall and learning so much from all the artists I’ve met in Neuk Collective. It’s a game-changer being in an environment that wholeheartedly puts artists, and especially Neurodivergent artists, first. I’ve never had that before, despite working in the arts for years! I’m super excited to start delivering Neuk Local events, and especially meeting volunteers who are interested in creating these special events in their area.”
The last thing we want to talk about here is Neurodivergent friendly volunteer recruitment and onboarding (yes, more glamorous admin!). We know volunteering, especially for ND people, can feel daunting – there is often a lot of paperwork hoops you have to jump through, sometimes you don’t know what ‘volunteering’ actually involves, maybe it’s hard to see how volunteering could actually help you as well as others!
Following our people-centred approach to volunteering in Neuk, we’re rethinking how people first approach volunteering with the collective. Things like using gentle, low‑pressure spaces like volunteer coffee afternoons where people can hear about roles, ask questions and be honest about their energy levels. We are also exploring more accessible ways of sharing information – like short videos or simple visual explainers – rather than long, text‑heavy documents. If you have any suggestions about how to make volunteering more accessible to you, then please do reach out and tell us!
Volunteering at Neuk isn’t about being endlessly available or “proving yourself” for paid work later. It’s about building something with other neurodivergent people – something that makes our creative lives a bit less lonely, a bit less precarious, and a bit more possible.
If you want to volunteer with Neuk Collective, then you can fill out a volunteer application form here or email volunteers@doorinthewall.co.uk
For questions specifically about Neuk Local please get in touch with anna@doorinthewall.co.uk