Resident Spotlight: John Smith’s Volunteer Journey

John Smith has been mowing the park’s north field for nineteen years. He has never been on a committee, never held a title, and — until we asked — had never been thanked in print. This seemed like an oversight worth correcting.

Nineteen years of Saturdays

It started, as these things do, with nobody else doing it. The council cut the maintenance budget in 2006 and the field went uncut for a summer. John owned a mower. “It was going to take an afternoon,” he says. “That was the entire thought process.”

What it actually involves

Roughly forty Saturdays a year, two hours each, from March to October. Over nineteen years that is somewhere north of fifteen hundred hours — which he describes as “not a lot, spread out.”

People think volunteering means signing up for something. Mostly it means noticing something and then not walking past it.

The part he did not expect

The mowing is not what kept him going. It is the conversations: the same dog walkers every week, the children who grew up and came back with their own, the neighbor who brought him a cup of tea every Saturday for eleven years until she moved away.

What he would tell someone starting

Pick something small and concrete, he says, and something you can do alone if nobody else turns up. “Every big volunteering scheme I have seen here collapsed in about two years. The mowing carried on because it only ever needed one person to show up.”

The north field is cut this Saturday, as usual, at about ten.