St Agnes Museum Trust is absolutely delighted and tremendously honoured to have been awarded the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service 2011 and is very grateful to all our volunteers whose hard work in so many different ways has made this award possible.
We have more than 60 volunteers helping to run the Museum, doing everything from stewarding seven days a week during a long season, to maintaining our working longcase clocks, providing hanging baskets, helping at coffee mornings (including baking cakes and growing plants), maintaining a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about St Agnes Parish, and painting and decorating.
This winter many of our regular volunteers braved the freezing weather to help with the major refurbishment of the Museum, emptying and refilling cabinets, removing old carpets, painting internally and externally, and cleaning the listed building from top to toe after the building works had been completed.
But as our citation makes clear, the Museum does much more than recruit and care for volunteers who help at the Museum:
“Volunteers take exhibits out to schools, allowing schools that cannot visit to benefit from its work. The Museum’s internet site and postal response means that it serves not only the wider community but also a worldwide Cornish Diaspora.
This is an outstanding local charity providing not only a local community focus for the village, but also reaching a wider audience, giving an excellent volunteering experience for a large number of people as well as aiding a diverse group of beneficiaries.”
Some of the letters of support for the Museum’s nomination came from students at St Agnes School. Here is a flavour of what they said:
The Museum people helped me find a photo of my house when it was bombed in the war
The ladies at the Museum have photocopied my family tree for me. They are really kind and helpful.
There’s a turtle at the Museum and do you know how it died? It swallowed a plastic bag because he thought it was a jellyfish.
Museum spokesman, Liz Thompson, said that “being nominated had been a very helpful experience, focusing on our volunteers and beneficiaries rather than on the care of the collection or our listed building.” We now look forward to the Award Presentation, while representatives of our group will attend a Royal Garden Party.