Volunteering and working with GWL by Alice

Alice started volunteering at the library in 2009 and now, after helping on a number of projects, she works for us as a sessional tutor with the national lifelong learning project. Here Alice talks about her journey with GWL:

“I started volunteering at the Glasgow Women’s Library in October 2009. To begin with I worked as a project intern helping the library to put together a pop-up library for an exhibition held at the Centre for Contemporary Art as part of the Glasgow International Festival. Between 2010 and 2011, I worked mainly as an archives volunteer. This involved working on listing specific collections in the GWL archive, mainly in their large Lesbian Archive collection.

In 2011, I was asked to work on a partnership project between the GWL and LGBT Youth Scotland. The project sought to open up our collections to a younger audience, particularly to young bisexual, lesbian, transgender or queer women, and to create a project which would contribute to and update our own archive collections. I worked as a project facilitator for a zine project which worked with young women from GWL and LGBT Youth creating a zine, in part inspired by our own collections, and their own experiences of being a young LGBTQ person in Glasgow

Since October 2012, I have also been working as part of the National Lifelong Learning team as a paid sessional tutor for the Dumbarton Women’s History Detectives group. I help members of the group to create their own women’s history projects, providing them with support in choosing areas for research, helping them to research their projects and arranging for group visits to local libraries and museums. I love working with this fantastic group of women, and am really looking forward to seeing what the women discover on the next Dumbarton course.

Working as a volunteer for the GWL has always been a stimulating experience, and has provided me with absolutely invaluable skills, particularly in project work. It is great to now be paid for some of the work that I do for the library, and I hope to be able to continue my work for the GWL after I graduate.”