Three days, eight vehicles, eleven crews, four support teams, 960 trees, £8,000 raised
For most of the year, 1st Weston Green operates as a scout group, focusing on equipping young people with skills for life through activity-based learning, outdoor adventures, and challenges. But for one week in January, the whole group – trustees, leaders, and all the parents too – turns into a Christmas tree collection and recycling service.
By doing this, we provide a valuable and much appreciated community service, while raising lots of money to pay for the equipment the scout group needs. This short, intense effort is our only annual fundraising event, so we expect every family to get involved in some way or other, if they possibly can.
Between 6th and 8th January, our volunteer crews were out on the streets of Weston Green, Molesey, Thames Ditton and Hinchley Wood, picking up trees from people’s houses and taking them off in vans, trucks and trailers to be recycled into compost. Each vehicle had a driver, a navigator to find the trees and a lugger to haul them and cram them into the vehicle. It was hard, physical work, out in the wet and cold. But it was also immensely satisfying to work as part of a well-functioning team, doing something that for most of our volunteers was quite different to their usual job.
As well as the vehicle crews, we had a team to help unload vehicles at the drop-off point and another team who helped the drivers to clean thousands of pine needles out of their vans at the end of the collection. In the background, a vehicle dispatch and communications team handled customer queries, chased up missing trees, and kept the vehicle crews busy with trees to collect. Before we
even started, other teams planned the collection, set up the IT systems, and organised the parent volunteers into crews and roles.
Because of time constraints, we limited this year’s collection to 1000 trees, but we have done more than this in the past and will do again in the future.
We’ve put up a gallery of pictures here on the website, so you can get an idea of the fun we all had!