You don’t need any special skills to volunteer at FAN, just a desire to keep feminist history alive and accessible.
There are lots of different ways you can help. One of our biggest tasks is the preservation of new collections. Think of all the documents you’ve seen that are stapled together. Well, those staples rust in the end and degrade the paper, so they all have to be removed and replaced by rust-free paperclips. The process of preserving and cataloguing a new collection is like taking a journey through someone’s political life.
There is also work to maintain the archive as an accessible collection. For example, digitising tape cassettes and CDs needs doing before the means to play them disappears.
Or perhaps your interest lie elsewhere? Women with web and social media skills are most welcome.
If you’re interested in joining us, please contact us. We are currently only in the FAN office on Thursdays, but with more volunteers the office could be open more often.