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| Gaynor stewarding at the Ryedale Festival |
The Ryedale Festival has been awarded The King’s Award for Voluntary Service, the highest honour given to volunteer groups in the UK, recognising the extraordinary contribution of more than 100 volunteers who help bring music to communities across North and East Yorkshire. Here, Christopher Glynn, the festival’s artistic director talks about the impact that volunteers can have on a festival.
As a travelling musician, you quickly learn that there are two kinds of welcome.
Sometimes you arrive at a concert hall, collect your backstage pass, find your dressing room and get on with the business of rehearsing and performing. Everything is perfectly professional, as it should be, and we’re grateful for it.
But at other times you’re welcomed by someone whose involvement is of a different kind. You’re met by a volunteer who has given up a day, or perhaps several weeks, to help make the concert happen. Someone who is rooted in the place, has a personal investment in making the occasion a success and wants you to enjoy it as much as they do. Small differences, perhaps, but they can change the whole experience.
Over the years, I’ve lost count of the musicians who’ve told me they’ve experienced this special kind of welcome from the volunteers at Ryedale Festival. I think what they’re responding to is something more than friendliness or efficiency. It’s the feeling of being welcomed into a community, rather than just arriving to give a concert.
That’s one reason why I’m so delighted that Ryedale Festival has received the King’s Award for Voluntary Service, the highest recognition given to volunteer groups in the UK. It’s a wonderful honour for well over a hundred people whose commitment and energy help make the festival what it is.
We estimate that their contribution is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in equivalent professional costs. Without them, we simply couldn’t do what we do.
But here’s the interesting thing. Even if we had that money to spend on more professional staff, we’d never want to replace them. Because the real value of volunteering isn’t how much money it saves, but why people choose to do it in the first place.
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| Stewards at the Ryedale Festival |
The Ryedale Festival presents concerts in around 50 locations across more than 3,000 square miles of North Yorkshire and the East Riding, bringing internationally renowned musicians to places and communities where opportunities to experience live classical music are often few and far between.
Our volunteers are at the heart of this ambitious undertaking. Ranging in age from their early teens to their late nineties, they work in tandem with our brilliant professional team to welcome audiences, look after musicians, share local knowledge and give the Festival much of its personality. The performers may be the ones on stage, but there’s an art to everything that happens around them too.
One of the great pleasures of directing a festival is working with these people. Many have become good friends. I look forward to seeing them, enjoy their company and value the ideas and enthusiasm they bring to everything we do. And there’s no doubt that volunteering brings its own rewards too, from friendship and a sense of purpose to the well-documented benefits for health and wellbeing.
There’s a much bigger story here too. Across the UK, volunteers are keeping churches open, looking after historic buildings, organising concerts, productions and exhibitions, and making cultural life possible in places that might otherwise have very little of it. There is an infrastructure of generosity that is far too easy to overlook.
But volunteers don’t just help make culture possible. They also remind us why it matters. By giving their time freely, they show the value of bringing people together and the importance of feeling connected to something larger than ourselves. These aren’t just benefits of volunteering. They’re at the heart of what culture is for.
The King’s Award is a wonderful recognition of the people who do this at Ryedale. But it’s also an opportunity to celebrate the countless others who, across the UK, give their time to make the arts thrive.
Volunteers aren’t just supporting our cultural life. They’re creating it. And they bring something that no amount of money could ever buy.
Christopher Glynn
