Strand: Volunteering

Strands connect past and present project pages, blog posts and online exhibitions from across our website. Read our introduction to the Volunteering strand, or browse all the strand-related content below - follow one of the links and start exploring!

Volunteering Pages

Volunteering

Glasgow Women’s Library has been shaped and nourished by volunteers since its inception in 1991.

Volunteer at GWL

Our Volunteering Programme supports dozens of volunteers each year, aiming to give everyone the training and support they need to allow them to find their place within the organisation, regardless of how much or how little previous experience they have, and whatever their reasons for volunteering.

Volunteering Posts

Volunteer Story- Lauren

Lauren has volunteered with us since August 2023. She is a familiar face on the front desk and can often be seen with a camera at events. Read more about what she’s been doing and check out some of her beautiful photos.

Knitting the Woman’s Woolly: Podcast

What should have been a quick blog post, rapidly grew to four posts when Becky started writing about feminism and knitting. This is the audio version of those posts to hopefully make a long piece of writing a little more accessible.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Volunteer Stories -Three Decades of Volunteering

Watch a video featuring past and present volunteers sharing their memories of their time at GWL.

Knitting the Woman’s Woolly: Part 1 – Purls of Feminist History

Feminist magazine Spare Rib published a pattern for a handknitted jumper in 1982. As volunteer Becky knitted one up for our collection, the more there was to learn about the jumper and its position in the history of knitting and feminism.

Volunteer Story-Anabel

Inspired by the “Volunteer Profiles” which featured in the GWL newsletters published in the 1990’s and 2000’s, we’re introducing some of our current volunteers, to highlight how they support our work […]

Inspiration and Conversation at A Beacon of Hope: Libraries for the Future event

Our volunteer Fi reflects on our Libraries of the Future event, which included presentations from inspirational library friends, Book Bunk in Nairobi and Oodi Library in Helsinki, and a workshop […]

Women in Profile: From Glasgow to Nuremberg

As part of her placement at GWL, Catherine spent time in the archive researching the library’s international connections to queer and feminist groups and institutions. She also had the pleasure of speaking with Adele Patrick about her memories of Women in Profile’s early links to international groups.

Origin Story: She Settles in the Shields

Interviewing Syma Ahmed about the impact and necessity of documenting the lives of migrant women in Pollockshields.

Volunteer Story- Pauline

My involvement with GWL started almost 10 years ago when, encouraged by my daughter who is a friend of Wendy, I first visited the library. It quickly became part of my life, especially the Story Cafe which I help Wendy with and for which I now write a regular blog.

Lost Voices of Partition: workshops, experience and what you can expect to gain from cross-cultural conversations

by Aishwarya Balasubramanian Partition- it never sounded like the great successful glory it was broadcasted as in the history books of India when I was learning from my school. At […]

Net Zero – the goal we’re all striving for

On the 29th of June the GWL hosted ‘Towards a Green Library’ where the GWL Handbook to Net Zero was showcased. The event was an informative one, where several staff […]

Volunteer Story – Ashley

Work experience at GWL

Read about 17 year old Anna’s week of work experience at GWL.

“A Guiding Hand” – Founding Lesbians in Peer Support (LIPS)

This blog is the first in a series of three blogs by Catherine who is doing a six month placement at GWL as part of her PhD. Over the past three months she has been exploring the Lesbians in Peer Support (LIPS) collection which is part of GWL’s organisational archive.

Volunteer Story- Shalini

Origin Story: Mixing the Colours

Mixing The Colours (2013-2015) was a GWL project which sought to address how intra-Christian sectarianism affects women in diverse communities. Our volunteer Miranda finds out more about the origins and impact of this revolutionary project

A long history: women in Scottish religion

My name is Ashley Thompson and I’m a current volunteer at GWL. When I’m not volunteering, I’m a history student whose passion is gender history, focussing on expressions of femininity […]

Green Growth from Seeds of Change: Green Events at GWL

In her third blog student placement Amelia takes a look back at Green Events at GWL over the last decade… Whilst trying to map environmentalism at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) […]

Green Growth from Seeds of Change: Introduction

Amelia is studying a Masters in Applied Gender Studies at Strathclyde University and completed her placement with us in April. Read her first in a series of blogs focusing on […]

30 Years of Volunteering

This is the ninth blog of a series in celebration of GWL’s 30th anniversary. Ahead of Volunteers’ Week, Celine delves into our Newsletters published from 1996 to 2008 to learn more about the history of volunteering at GWL.

GWL at 30: Changes in Lifelong Learning

Drawing on GWL’s Newsletters, published from 1996 to 2008, this post examine the development of the Lifelong Learning programme, something that continues to nourish the life of those of us who are involved in the library today, sometimes without us even being aware of it.

Joan Eardley and the Representation of Woman Artists: A Journey to Gender Equality

This is a blog written by our volunteer Mhairi on our recent exhibition of Joan Eardley’s works. Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley was born in Sussex on the 18th May 1921. […]

A transformative summer: my volunteering experience at Glasgow Women’s Library

My name is Myriam, I was a student placement at Glasgow Women’s Library for the summer, ending today. I want to share my experience with you and maybe even motivate you to try it out for yourself!

#MeToo: An Interview With Professor Karen Boyle

In the summer of 2020 I wrote some blog posts for GWL based on my undergraduate dissertation on the #MeToo movement (you can read my first blog post here). Fast […]

Mary Alice explains Speedway

In this blog our volunteer Mary Alice tells us about the speedway collection held at GWL and how she helped to archive it with another volunteer, Arran.

A Golden Chance

This blog is about our volunteer Saadia’s experience of being involved in the Textiles and Activism Project practically and her reflections on the project.

No precious words to say thanks to GWL

This blog post is about my experience of joining and experiencing GWL for the previous seven months. I came to Scotland from Pakistan around three years ago, but I spent most of that time at my home in Glasgow. I discovered the GWL on the internet. I learned to read and write in English from school and University, but I have learned to speak and listen in English here at GWL. People in Glasgow speak very fast!

Kirsty McBride on being our first Visual Communication Resident

Kirsty became our first Visual Communication Resident in 2015 and has continued to work with us ever since. Here she shares some of the projects she worked on and what […]

A french volunteer at GWL : the first two months of this adventure

Hello, I am Laura, a french newly graduated volunteer at Glasgow Women’s Library for four months. As two months already have passed (too) quickly, I wanted to make some kind […]

10 cool facts about my internship with GWL

It is here. My very last blog post for GWL now that my internship is coming to an end. As farewells are never easy by their nature, I thought long […]

Some last steps in research before I say goodbye…

Our intern Jeanette just published her last monthly blog post before her return back to Germany. We will greatly miss her!

First Hurrah Fares Well (Book Review)

“Swansong” by Kerry Andrew (Hardback – Jonathan Cape/ Penguin 2018) FICTION reviewed by Jay Andrew, Front of House volunteer I will admit that it was the author’s last name that […]

On Revolting Women, Revolting Interns

Hi everyone! I’m Katie, and I’ve been interning at GWL with the Edinburgh International Book Festival project. This blog post will be about our Revolting Women Takeover tent, which took […]

Of red crowns and Highland mountains

In her monthly blog post, our German intern Jeanette recounts her numerous experiences with GWL. This month, she takes you on a ride through the Scottish landscape and its people and she reminisces about Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Life at GWL after Museum of the Year, protesting against Trump and crafting suffragette sashes.

In this blog post, our intern Jeanette talks about getting crafty for GWL, protesting with us and what the past month had in store for her.

Processions, social media and campaigning.

In this blog post, our intern Jeanette recounts what she has been up to this month. Warning: may contain references to trips to Edinburgh, visits by social media people and her taking on a new job as a photographer.

A warm hello from our new intern

We are happy to welcome our new international volunteer, Jeanette. In this blog post, she will present herself and recount her first two weeks at GWL.

Thank you.

Pauline reflects on a 6 month long Erasmus funded internship with Glasgow Women’s Library.

The ‘Abracadabra’ of a Novel – Ece Temelkuran

In the penultimate week of Women in Translation Month, we’re very excited to present a guest blog post from Turkish journalist and author Ece Temelkuran. Here she tells us about her most recent novel, Women Who Blow On Knots, and the strange sensation produced by life imitating art.

Thoughts on Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel’s second memoir, Are You My Mother?, explores her relationship with her mother and her quest for her to understand their relationship. It discusses her experiences of therapy in her attempts both to understand herself from a psychoanalytical perspective and the way she and her mother interact with each other. It also covers her parents’ relationship, and her mother’s marriage to a closeted gay man as detailed in her first memoir, Fun Home.