Trustee Vacancies
We are currently seeking new trustees with an interest in helping us develop what we do. We are particularly interested in finding someone who wishes to act as charity Secretary – possibly as their first board-level role – as well as people with experience of business planning, income generation, or governance; those with lived experience of managing rural community buildings or sports centres; and those who can help us think about how to work with non-Christian faith groups and associated professions like building services engineering, the heating controls industry, and architecture.
Volunteering with us
If you have skills that would help us fulfill our mission, we would be delighted for you to get in touch. At the moment, we are still deciding on our volunteering priorities and in some cases, we would be introducing you to an organisation in your local area with us providing support using our specialist expertise. Here are some examples of things that would help our beneficiaries:
- facilitating our main programme with a local community group – a roughly 40 hour commitment that is particularly well-suited to engineers of any variety. In some areas, we can connect you with people who can help you find a group with a building that needs help. Past volunteers have told us it improved their client-facing skills and gave them a refreshing opportunity to interact with “clients” in a completely new way, learning how they see things – but mostly valued the chance to help their local community thrive.
- after training, performing site visits for our heating controls checks for a few buildings in your local area. This requires smartphone skills and good interviewing technique, and ideally some pre-existing knowledge of heating systems. We know how to perform useful checks and wish to develop robust techniques that allow us to offer them more widely without our lead controls volunteer physically visiting every site.
- web development. We’d like to port our Guide Book from Jupyter Book to a new web framework that will allow us to understand which parts are highly used and which need improvement while still meeting GDPR. Ideally, it would be easy to update using a GUI so we could more easily crowd-source improved content. At the same time, we know the look and usability could be greatly improved.
- software development. Community groups valued a service we used to provide that let them see the temperature of their building against when it is occupied, and this is most important “easy win” for them in saving energy, as many of them are completely surprised to find out when the heating is on. We no longer build our own electronics to do this and need a web app where users could upload their data as CSV files, fill in a diary form, and get a link to a plot in return, preferably for download and auto-expiration to reduce our need for file storage. You can see how we’ve done this in the past using Thingspeak, python, plotly, and Github Pages, with fancier plotting examples linked from the “Extras” page.