The Friends of Burngate has been set up by the Burngate Stone Carving Centre Trust to encourage people to become involved in the Centre and to keep friends up-to-date with information on new courses and events.

Benefits

You will be invited to attend Centre meetings and will receive a quarterly newsletter about the centre by email, or if you are local you can pick up one from the Centre. The Friends also plan to organise evening events such as cheese and wine, music and hog roasts. You'll also get early visibility of the new courses we'll be running,  so have the chance to book up before we run out of places!  Past events have included a cheese & wine evening, and the stone & craft Fair

Volunteers required:

• Weeding and gardening
• We need help to provide cover at the Centre over busy periods in school holidays - to talk to visitors about the Centre and the courses we have to offer

Fundraising:

There's some equipment that we could really do with at Burngate and we're hoping that the Friends could do some fundraising for them. The items we'd like are:

• Petrol strimmer
• Work lights for workshop
• Angle grinder

Future Events & Activities:

Below are some of the events that our members suggested we host at Burngate, if you have an interest in any of these or would like to get involved in any of it then please get in touch.

• Mandarin language & culture
• Life drawing classes
• Chinese painting
• Tai Chi
• Open air theatre & performance art
• Solstice morning with breakfast
• Storytelling
• Film nights
• Project working teams
• Talks on stone history
• Landscape painting
• Music evenings
• Rural craft fair
• Rural crafts - hedge laying, stone walling, hurdle making, willow work, wood carving
• Quarry tours
• Activity holidays
• More chesse & wine
• Hog roast
• Poetry workshop
• Performance

Other stuff we'd be happy to have your help with:

• Site & tool maintenance
• Keeping the foliage under control particularly at the entrance to the site
• Tidying up the workshop space (so we don't disappear under a layer of dust and rubble) and site
• Marking out the car parking spaces at the rear of the Centre
• Stock levels and supply of stone

Publicity:

• help administrating and promoting the Friends network
• organising ideas and activities for promotional events
• attending and manning stalls at local fairs and events on behalf of Burngate
• distibution of leaflets
• spreading the word, using your contacts!
• contributing to the newsletter

Catering:

• cakes and drinks for special events

Admin:

• help with accounts
• help with processing bookings for courses
• performing stock checks on materials and tools etc.

All other things:

• potentially being ‘keyholders’ for when the centre needs to be open out of normal working hours and/or when Manager is not required to be present.
• help in compiling a ‘stone audit’ of all interesting or significant stone related items or sites in Purbeck.
• Creating a wildlife inventory of all the plants and creatures seen at the site
• production of material to have on display in the kitchen/mess, such as local history, wildlife, archaeology, and geology