Interview with Allan Herbert speaking about his volunteering experiences with the Riverside Warehouse, Riverside, Cardiff

Disgrifiad

Interview with Allan Herbert speaking about his volunteering work at Riverside Warehouse. Interview recorded at the Riverside Festival on 20 August 2016.

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The Chronicle Project is a community heritage project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and run by VCS Cymru with the aims to document the history of volunteering in Cardiff, from 1914 to 2014.

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AH = Alan Herbert

AH: My name is Alan, Alan Herbert. I’ve lived in Riverside for 37 years, just a couple of streets away from where we are now. I also work in the area in a community setting. I was brought up in an environment of volunteering, my father belonged to a thing called RAOB which is a sort of organisation which helps people stand for The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, which is kind of a strange name. There was a lot of volunteering to help families where I was born in Pontypridd. A lot of work going on there. My mother was also a strong volunteer-er, she was part of a choir who used to go sing in hospitals. She was also part of a women’s voluntary service who wanted to sing in hospitals.

So I was surrounded by volunteering when I was growing up. I didn’t have to learn about volunteering, it was part of my life. I’ve done lots of small bits of volunteering, I’ll talk specifically about one of the mist major things I have done, which is to do with the building I am looking at right now in Riverside, it’s called the Riverside Warehouse and that was a building which was a warehouse and as part of the process of the area of Riverside going through some big regeneration, there was a little bit given to community spaces.

And there was a community consultation, there were several options. They could pull the building down as it was sort of falling down but enough people came forward and said they would like it kept for some sort of community use. By this point I had 4 children, 2 of them were sort of 6 and 7 years old and I had begun to realise that there wasn’t anything for them in the area. So that was a driver for me, to try and do something for my own children and for their friends.

And I became part of an action group called “Save the Warehouse” so we managed to get with the local authority and some other government money to try and rebuild the building. And we formed into a group and formed then into a charity, I was the chair of that charity for some 7 years. But there has been a lot of volunteering that went in, I was a very active chair in that I was in the building doing a lot of volunteering day in day out. I did all the fundraising, raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to keep the centre going. I learnt how to run a charity, learnt how to run payrolls, I did all of that. I was the caretaker so I was the one who would come and open the building up, all times of the day and night. I was the main person for alarm call outs so often I would have to come out in the middle of the night because the alarm had gone off.

I did that for 7 years and I got a lot out of it and that type of volunteering where you are providing a service to people, you get this immediate gratification. And the gratification comes from seeing hundreds of kids going in and out the building. I am looking at it now, it is part of the festival today and I know that the building wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t of been for the efforts of myself and a small group of volunteers.

So that’s gratification. That’s part of it but I think most people who volunteer aren’t generally boastful about it, they just get on and do it. The gratification come from seeing it as better for other people. You just get a nice warm glow so that’s the main thing for me.
I have a couple of instance I’ll talk about which is just a couple of spontaneous things which show you how the whole thing got accepted by other people, particularly young people. Young people do tend to get a lot of bad press if you like, why are they doing this? Why are they kicking balls against my wall? Why are they doing this, why are they doing that?... The bottom line is there aren’t enough positive things to get involved with. They are often not they are not negative but are perceived as negative.

The charity we ran we did kind of run out of steam after about 7 years. We ran it just through the local authority and grants and we did run a full on youth service, employing people, running the building and all that. So as a charity we got to the point where we just couldn’t do it anymore. And we passed it onto other organisations. These organisations we currently worked for and now have the lease on the building. So they buildings kept well but as a charity we just got worn out really.

Two things happened in the midst of all of that. They building had to shut for about a two-year period while other systems were put in place to reopen it again. Two things happened in this period which I think are a brilliant indication about the impact these things make. One was a tragic incident with a girl who was one of twins in the area, who was 15-16, and was involved in a very bizarre, tragic road accident. She got killed in a car crash on a motorway.

The young people in the area, without any prompting, the building was shut at this time, wasn’t even open as a youth centre. They used the windows of the building as a memorial. They came along and wrote their messages in pens and felt pens. It was the way they marked the passing of this girl so their sense of ownership of the building was such that they chose it to make a memorial for a girl who had died. There were 100 or more messages written on the windows, all in memorial.
And the other one which I mentioned was when they building was shut for public use, we still had the keys and we would let people work on various projects store things there. And I was coming back, walking through the area one winter night and it was dark. I walked passed it and I saw that the way in through shutter doors were open and there were two young guys standing in the doorway.

I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I walked over to speak to these two young guys who were 14/15, and they said “Oh good, you’ve come!”. They were standing guard because they saw someone had forgot to close the shutter. They were just standing there to make sure no one went in and caused any damage until someone came along to do something about it.
So both those instances to me are a clear indication of the impact the volunteering has had as they feel like they belong to something. And I find that so gratifying.