Reading Hydro is a volunteer-led organisation: our Directors, Advisory Board and the many volunteers involved are members of the local Reading community. Our common purpose is to to help make sustainable energy from the Thames in Reading a reality by coming together to support the delivery and success of the project
The Board of Directors hold the legal responsibility for the project, and each look after at least one of our ‘focus areas’ to ensure the project can meets its goals. Our Advisory Members offer specialist advice in a range of areas to support the Board in their decision making. Our Volunteers are an extremely talented and dedicated group of people who support the project by carrying out a variety of work, such as:
- Helping and participating at our Events
- looking after our social media and website
- Designing branding and merchandise for the project
- Building, digging, clearing our site for the various building phases
- Advocating for the project with other members of the community
- As well as many, many more things…
Have an idea about how you could contribute to the success of our project? We’re driven forward by our volunteers, so don’t hesitate to contact us to get involved!
READING HYDRO FOCUSED Areas
We have a number of ‘focus areas’ where you could help us through volunteering your time, skills and services:
- Technology & Civils: Looks after the requirements surrounding the turbines, foundations and electrical aspects of the project
- Risk & Project Management: Keeps an overview of the project risks and manages the delivery of the build and commissioning phases.
- Legal: interfaces with all our regulators and authorities to ensure we have the required permissions and licenses to proceed.
- Finance: Accountable for looking after all fiscal aspects of the society, from expenditure to future income from electricity generation
- Communications: Responsible for the promoting and publicising Reading Hydro, and building educational resources about sustainable hydro power
- Data: Looks after the technology and platforms that will share the range of data collected on site following its commissioning
- Ecology: Ensuring that we meet our commitments to protecting and enhancing the local ecology of View Island and the Weir.
- Administration: Ties the whole project together, as well as looking after our membership, investors and documentation.
WE HAVE AN IMMEDIATE NEED FOR VOLUNTEERS IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS:
- Ecology: We want Local ecologists with an interest in fish, bats, birds, insects and plant-life to help us build our medium- & long-term strategies for our site.
- Education: We want to develop educational resources for use in local schools and online – those who can design teaching packs and content are welcome to contact us
- Design: We would like to add to our growing collection of merchandise (particularly card designs) as well as create online images for use on our website (such as gifs and diagrams). Those happy to volunteer their services should get in touch.
We’re also looking for volunteers who would support us in the build phase. There are tasks that we need help with such as digging channels for our Fish Pass and clearing the site of plants ready for building. These opportunities to help will be occurring mainly between October 2020 and March 2021.