10 Cheers for 10 Years by HOME’s Volunteers

Thu 26 Jun – Sun 14 Sep

What role does Volunteering play in our lives? Why do we give our spare time to support HOME?

Through a showcase of revealing personal stories, poetry, photographs, new collaborative artworks and collected archival materials from over HOME’s first 10 years, we share with you a snippet of our artistic expression and what volunteering means to us.

We are a group of around 120 volunteers, each with our own story to tell. Some of us are brand new to Volunteering at HOME. Many of us have been here since 2015, when HOME opened its doors and some of us even volunteered at Cornerhouse and The Library Theatre before that. 10 Cheers for 10 Years will go beyond our roles, revealing our passions and motivations for supporting arts, culture and the thousands of visitors that have passed through over the years.

Through giving our precious time, unique skills and diverse perspectives, we receive back something we were searching for. For some of us, choosing to Volunteer is our way to give back or a way to spend time totally immersed in arts and culture. For others, it’s a tool to invest in or sharpen our skills. Sometimes, Volunteering is an act of self-care and recovery, one step on our road back to ourselves.

Through our documentary film by filmmaker Lewis Doherty featuring music by Methyl Orange, we share our personal stories and an engaging insight into our time at HOME. Our archive contains our personal, sentimental and collected items that we have chosen to keep over the years.

10 Cheers for 10 Years also showcases a collection of our poetry, artworks and photographs that reveal the diversity of creative practices and celebrate important collaborations that have shaped our community over the past decade.

A group of us have also come together to cocreated new artworks with artists George Gibson and Grace Collins, exploring our memories of volunteering at HOME over the past decade through zine-making, badges and reflections.

Felicity Faye, Volunteer Manager at HOME said: “Our Volunteers are what makes HOME so special, it just wouldn’t be the same without them. I feel so lucky to get to work alongside such kind, passionate, and dedicated people. I would like to thank them, for all the time, energy, and creativity that they have poured into this exhibition, and for everything they bring to HOME each day.”

One Volunteer at HOME said: “Everybody here is really friendly and welcoming, it’s really fun. Stepping into HOME, I forget all my problems at my own home. Having a good time with everybody, it just helped me through a really sad time.”

10 Cheers for 10 Years celebrates the invaluable contributions of volunteers at HOME over the past decade.