Volunteering at Dalby Forest

Join your local team of volunteers to learn new skills, meet new people, make new friends and enhance your local forest for the benefit of nature and the community.

Activity Leaders

Activity Leaders are friendly, approachable and thrive when engaging with people on a busy, visitor focused site. You will enjoy helping children and adults alike enjoy the activity you are leading, be it a craft session, beanbag toss or guided walk! Your passion for the forest and the outdoors will inspire our visitors to enjoy Dalby and want to return to discover more. You will be working in a friendly and approachable team, helping us to provide an excellent customer service experience for each person who visits.

This role offers the opportunity to develop customer service skills, face to face communications and gain experience working in the recreation and tourism sector. You will get the satisfaction of knowing you’ve added a bit of joy to someone’s day by their engagement in your activity. We will work with you to choose activities to lead that interest you, so that you can share the full enthusiasm of your activity with visitors.

We are looking for volunteer support at our busiest times. These are mainly school holidays, weekends and bank holidays through the spring and summer months. This role would be subject to an enhanced DBS check.

If you think you’re the person for us, please complete the form on this page and when asked what role you’re interested in, type “Activity Leader”.

Visitor Experience Volunteers

This enthusiastic team aim to help visitors get the most out of their visit to Dalby Forest. They could be giving general information about the facilities, advising on the best cycle trail or explaining where to spot our Gruffalo! Sometimes, we might need you at a mobile information station, offering help to visitors about trails, walks, bike rides, toilets, cafes and everything in between! Other times we might ask you to help with car parking, tidying and litter-picking the outside areas near the Visitor Centre or walking the trails as a highly visible member of staff to offer support to visitors.

We will provide full training for the Visitor Experience Volunteer role. This will include an induction to the Visitor Centre and wider site. If you think you’d like to help people get the most from their visits, please complete the form on this page and when asked which role you’d like to apply for type “Visitor Experience Volunteer”.

Friends of Dalby Forest volunteers

Friends of Dalby Forest work with Forestry England on a variety of different tasks and events throughout the year, with regular meetings on the 2nd Sunday of every month. This group engage in a variety of practical outdoor tasks to enhance and maintain the Forest for everyone, with recent tasks varying from digging drinking pools for Turtle Doves, footpath maintenance, work at the enchanted wood play area, tending to willow sculptures and conservation of ancient monuments.

Bike Trail volunteering

Maintaining Dalby Forest and all of its trails takes some work! Dalby has some fantastic mountain bike trails and we work with volunteers to develop and maintain these. Our rangers run regular volunteer days on the mountain bike trails in Dalby Forest, usually on the 3rd Sunday every month. The mountain bike trails at Stainburn are maintained by SingletrAction in partnership with Forestry England, but please do get in touch if you are interested in volunteer with either group.

Arts volunteering

Dalby Forest boasts an array of artwork sculptures and pieces, designed to bring out the hidden depths of the forest and evoke curiosity and magic. From large to small, our sculptures and art pieces all need a touch of tender loving care and the help of volunteers is much needed. You will be given a full induction and learn about all of the art pieces in the Forest or on display in our gallery space We need help with setting up some of the exhibitions and support hands-on with the artists themselves in their workshops.

Shadow Volunteer scheme 

Individuals thinking about a career in forestry may be interested in our Shadow Volunteer scheme.   

Taking place in the nation’s forests across England, Shadow Volunteers are given training, experience and development opportunities by work shadowing Forestry England staff. The scheme runs for six months, one to three days a week.  

Find out more about the scheme and when to apply via the button below.