Volunteer Gardener - Young Onset Dementia Group

Job overview

With an underused sensory garden and garden at the back, Highpoint House, home to Children & Young People’s therapies, has an invaluable opportunity to:-

• Bring people together to improve their health and wellbeing
• Improve the aesthetics of the sensory garden
• Be creative in providing a calm and relaxing space within the sensory garden
• Co-produce with service users and the local community
• Improve biodiversity through plant diversity
• Provide good quality habitat for wildlife
• Allow nature to be therapeutic
• Increase the quality of access to nature
• Reduce harmful practice in daily practice to limit the loss to our eco-systems.

Main duties of the job

Key Task and Responsibilities:

A volunteer would provide invaluable support to:

• Maintain planted areas, with regular watering, weeding, mulching etc.
• Support improvements to the sensory garden
• Create wildlife habitats, such as insect hotels, bird boxes
• Monitor butterflies, pollinators, plants and other wildlife
• Work alongside and support volunteer gardener at Memorial Hospital site
• Work with small groups of service users as ‘garden buddies’
• Share knowledge and experience with ‘garden buddies’
• Encourage participation of ‘garden buddies’
• Maintain and monitor the upkeep of any tools and materials
• Report any concerns or issues about ‘garden buddies’ to named employee for Oxleas NHS Trust at that time
• Report any concerns or issues about the garden or materials to the Sustainability Manager

When working with Oxleas Service Users:

Responsibility for the group (or any service user working with the volunteer) will lie with a named employee of Oxleas NHS Trust. Someone employed by the Trust will be with the group (or individual) throughout any activity

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

With a underused sensory garden and garden at the back, Highpoint House, home to Children & Young People’s therapies has an invaluable opportunity to:-

Applicant requirements

The postholder will have access to vulnerable people in the course of their normal duties and as such this post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service to check for any previous criminal convictions.