If your company is interested in supporting Katharine House through volunteering, please have a look through our current volunteer roles and opportunities. Here you will find roles for individuals, pairs, small groups or larger groups including collection days, events, public speaking and gardening.  

We are sorry but we are unable to accommodate bespoke volunteering opportunities for teams on set dates and times. We have a very limited number of group activities available and when we do, they are listed on our website or we contact our corporate partners where we feel an opportunity (namely Store Wars and garden volunteering - for more information on these, see below) would specifically benefit both their team and Katharine House Hospice.  

Below we have detailed just some of the volunteering opportunities we have available at various times of the year that you might like to keep an eye out for if you or your team wish to get involved. 

Does your place of employment give paid time off to volunteer during work hours? Lots of our volunteering opportunities are in the evening or on a weekend, so it would be great if you could either encourage your staff to give their time and help them by offering time off in lieu in the following days or weeks, or, as an employee encourage your place of work to do this.

Help at events

Our flagship fundraising events Moonlight Walk and Santa Fun Run are attended by hundreds of people from the local community each year. They are much loved and anticipated events.

For both of these events we rely on the support of volunteers to help keep our walkers and runners safe as well as keeping them motivated.

Alternatively, your company could 'sponsor a mile' and adopt a stretch of the Moonlight Walk to decorate and marshal with volunteers, providing a cheer squad for all our walkers and joining in the fun, making the route more entertaining and interactive for the participants.

We also need volunteers to help with our annual Christmas tree recycling scheme each January. We need volunteer drivers, preferably with access to vans and we also need volunteer drivers’ mates, as we send teams out in pairs to pick up the Christmas trees for recycling.

In addition to the Santa Fun Run and Tree-cycle, Christmas is a very busy time at Katharine House Hospice and at this time we need:

• people to help with all the cutting, wrapping and sticking at our Christmas Gift Wrap
• quite literally, hoards of volunteers to support the fantastic Tractor Run that sees 100 tractors chug through all the local villages and Banbury
• and there are always other community events and collections where many hands make light work.  

Store Wars

Our charity shops can be found in Banbury, Bicester, Brackley, Chipping Norton, Moreton-in-Marsh and Shipston-on-Stour. We invite small teams to take over our shops for the day and compete to drive up profit to see who can raise the most money in one day.

Teams can be as creative as they like (the more creative you are, the more you will raise), boosting fundraising on the day with a wide range of ideas, such as cake sales and raffles to special one-off promotions.

If you take part in a Store Wars day, we will brief your team on the event and then it’s up to your teams to work together to come up with a money-spinning idea that they can deliver on the day. It’s a great way to get some friendly rivalry going while also having fun.

At the end of the day, we will present the winners with the coveted Store Wars Challenge cup to recognise their efforts and, of course, their success. We will be able to tell you how much the teams’ efforts have raised throughout the day so they will take away a great sense of achievement, knowing they’ve raised money for the hospice.

We can take two volunteers in every shop, making this a great opportunity for up to 12 people at any one time.

Volunteering in our gardens

The beautiful gardens at the hospice are tended to by an amazing and dedicated group of volunteers who meet every Thursday morning – aided by sweet treats from our kitchen team for break time.

"We all had a great morning gardening at Katharine House. Thank you to Head Gardener Brian for all your help; we learnt so much about gardening. It is great to help our community through volunteering and to really make a difference. The bacon butties were also a real treat, thank you." Charlotte, Jacobs Douwe Egberts

Once a month we open out the opportunity for a corporate team of up to eight people to join our gardeners for the morning and help with things like planting, weeding, hedge cutting, leaf clearing and sweeping. There are also opportunities to carry out small projects, such as painting the pergolas.

And yes, we’ll make sure our kitchen team get the memo so that you are rewarded at break time with something delicious.

Our commitment to each other

We know plans change, but we ask that when you sign up to volunteer with Katharine House Hospice that you fully commit to the opportunity as a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make all the plans. As a charity, our staff time and the resources we have are so precious and we want to make sure we use them effectively.  

Get in touch

If you’re interested in getting involved with one of these projects, please drop us an email at [email protected].