Volunteers Needed

We Need YOU!

It takes an Army of Volunteers to make our activities a success: almost 100 Interest Groups, Monthly Meetings, Coffee Mornings, pub quizzes, social events, outings etc – we can’t do it alone! To manage our activities we have a committee and also 6 teams. Please see the brief descriptions of each team’s work below to see how we work and where we we need help, and then please look lower down where we list the vacancies we are particularly anxious to fill at the moment

Groups Team

The groups team is responsible for:

  • talking to existing and new members and helping them to find and join our Interest Groups, for example at Coffee Mornings and Monthly Meetings.
  • finding out what new groups our members would like and helping to start them
  • ensuring that groups-related data is kept up to date on the website and our other IT systems
  • responding to requests for help or advice from Group Leaders or members
  • responding to incoming emails to the Groups team, one of the official Chichester U3A email addresses

Social Team

The Social team looks after all of our social events. This includes:

  • Our two regular monthly activities open to all members:  the Coffee Morning held on the first Tuesday of each month, and the Monthly Meeting held on the third Thursday of each month.  
  • Trips and outings. This includes visits to the local Chichester Festival and Minerva theatres, visits to local flower displays (eg Arundel, for the tulips) or further afield (eg Leonardslee gardens)
  • our regular monthly quiz night at the Chichester Inn
  • meeters and greaters who welcome new members and introduce them to others
  • arrange tea teams for events
  • Christmas lunch
  • annual thank you tea
  • summer party

Membership team

The work of membership team includes:

  • answering queries about membership
  • welcoming new members
  • arranging membership subscriptions
  • maintaining our list of volunteers

Media team

This is our publicity department. They gather information about what we are doing and publish a fortnightly bulletin, and a reflective magazine twice a year.

IT team

As you would expect we rely a lot on IT. We have a database of members, we manage our website, and we provide support to the other teams.

Governance team

We are a large organisation with approaching one thousand members.. It is important that we maintain good modern working practices and the governance team tries to ensure this.

Committee

Your Committee comprises 4 officers (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer) and up to an additional 7 trustees. They meet once a month. We also welcome members who wish to visit us to see how the u3a is run. 

Vacancies that we are particularly anxious to fill

If you are interested please address any expressions of interest to our chair

  • The governance team is looking for a new team member who will help us define roles across the u3a and help us to find volunteers to fulfil them. We are hoping that someone who has had experience of doing this sort of work would like to work with us.
  • We are currently looking for one or two people to take over from the current Speakers’ team within the Social team for our Monthly Talks.  They have sourced speakers for the remainder of 2024 and for most of 2025, but they would appreciate having a new team to take over from them.  A new team will undoubtedly have fresh ideas and if you enjoy our Monthly Talks you might consider taking an active interest in planning and booking speakers. 
  • We have an efficient and pleasant team who look after the audiovisual requirements for our Monthly Talks, ensuring that our speakers have everything they need. Would you like to attend one of our talks and meet our supporting technical team?
  • Our Tuesday Coffee Mornings, held monthly at the Minerva Theatre, are attended by about 70 members, amongst whom are new members or even those looking to join.  We always need “Meeters and Greeters” and if you offer your help at one of these events our Committee members will be there to give you information about our activities that day so that you can welcome newcomers. 
  • Do you like attending quizzes?  Maybe you enjoy compiling questions?  If so, would you like to come along to some of our quizzes, held on the 2nd Thursday of every month at The Chichester Inn in West Street?  We need compilers to keep our members entertained. 
  • Our IT team is now very important to our success.  The team members run the website, our database, our email and communication systems and we are always pleased when members offer technical, as opposed to marketing, IT skills.