The Forrester Foundation runs on volunteer labour. Every trustee hour, every field placement, every bookkeeping afternoon at a kitchen table in Hampshire — it is all given freely. We thought we'd introduce three of the people who keep it working.
Elaine — retired primary headteacher, Hampshire
Elaine retired in 2019 after thirty-one years in primary education, and started volunteering with us the following spring. She does none of the glamorous work. She reads every quarterly field report that comes in from Sri Lanka, cross-checks the GPS references against the grant conditions, and flags anything that doesn't match. "I spent my career noticing when the numbers on the register didn't tally with the numbers in the classroom," she says. "It turns out this is the same skill, just applied to elephants."
She has never been to Sri Lanka. She says she might go one day, but that is not the point. "My job is to make sure the money does what we said it would do. I can do that perfectly well from a desk in Winchester."
Sanjay — postgraduate ecologist, Leeds
Sanjay joined the Ruhuna ranger placement in March 2023 as part of his applied conservation MSc at the University of Leeds. He went out for seven weeks; he stayed in touch with his host community for a year; he returned on his own budget in March 2024 as a cohort lead, supervising the next group of six volunteers.
"The Foundation was honest with me from the first call," he says. "They said it would be physically hard, emotionally difficult at times, and that I would need to defer to Sri Lankan colleagues on every field decision. That is exactly how it was. I learned more in those seven weeks than in the whole first year of my MSc." Sanjay is now writing up a component of his thesis using elephant-crossing data collected by the community monitors we fund.
Dilini — undergraduate, University of Ruhuna
Dilini is not a UK volunteer at all — she is Sri Lankan, studying marine biology in Matara. She joined the Rekawa turtle-hatchery team as a volunteer in her first year of undergraduate studies. Three years later she is one of the most experienced nest-monitors on the team and is drafting her dissertation on hawksbill hatchling plastic-entanglement rates using data she has collected herself.
"Foreign volunteers rotate through in six-week cycles," she says. "Somebody has to know what happened last July. That's usually us." She has been offered two scholarship places abroad and is unlikely to stay in Rekawa forever. What she has built there will stay behind her. The Trust's data protocol is essentially the one she documented as a second-year student.
What these three have in common
None of them did the expected thing. A retired teacher with a spreadsheet. A postgrad who defers to rangers. A Sri Lankan undergraduate who ended up running operational continuity for a British-registered charity. None of that fits a neat recruitment poster. But it is exactly the kind of person who ends up making a small, patient, unglamorous conservation organisation actually work.
If you'd like to volunteer with us — in the field, or remotely, or in a specific technical capacity you think we might need — we'd very much like to hear from you. Write to hello@forresterfoundation.org or use our contact form.