My experience as a Commonwealth Games volunteer
This article will take approximately 3 minutes to read
Published 11 Aug 2022 in Raising Awareness
After years of planning and preparation, the Commonwealth Games put on a fantastic spectacle in our Midland regions. Today we hear from Young Co-operators Network member, Ryan Bird who tells us all about his role in volunteering at the games. Take it away Ryan…
Over the last few months, the games took on an additional 800 staff members, more than doubling the 750 staff workforce they already had. Among this new wave of staff is a batch of volunteers, brought in to support the IT teams throughout the games. I recently travelled to Birmingham in order to complete my initial training day as a volunteer; here’s how my day went.
Supporting the teams – my first day
Arriving in Birmingham for 8AM, I and another volunteer made our way to Cornwall street, where a small number of us new starters would be filled in on the details for the games. 26 people filling an air conditioned room on one of the hottest days on record, with more attending via Zoom. Some of us are volunteers, others paid staff, but all are here in some way to assist with maintaining the IT systems of the games over the coming weeks.
As the staff hosting our induction explained, the IT systems are perhaps one of the most important pieces of infrastructure during the games and at the heart of it all is security. Thousands of laptops, Chromebooks and mobile phones, along with hundreds of printers have been set up and configured for their users and sent out to the 70 venues in which the competitions will be hosted and managed. Each of the thousands of devices has been set up to only access applications relevant to its specific purpose and each one must be maintained and secured for the duration of the games.
Cornerblock – if you look closely, you can see the Commonwealth Games logo on the meeting space window.
Importance of the IT teams
To do this, IT support must be available and responsive at all sites, between 6AM and 12AM, from now until the end of the games. This mammoth effort is part of the reason why so many staff are needed during the few weeks the games run. If anything goes down or becomes compromised, the very games themselves could be jeopardised. Though I’d already seen my shift times and read some of the initial details, it was only now I understood the true scale of the games, and this was only one department. The years of planning just how to pull it off and the many months pooled into setting up the digital and technological network necessary for the games all now came down to a few weeks of work where anything could happen. Beyond finally grasping how important each and everyone one of us is to the team, I was also deeply impressed at the people who put all this together.
Training begins. We all watch closely as the importance of our duties is laid out for us
The Games begin to take over the city
On our lunch, my companion and I took a walk around the city as we headed to pick up our accreditation passes. These passes, issued to everyone working on the games, would not only provide us access to where we’ll be working, but will also allow us to travel to and from work on public transport for free. On our walk across the city, we saw many sites, such as stairs telling us to become Birmingham and a large, ominous sign threatening that sports were only the beginning of this sports competition. What was striking was just how much of the city had been transformed in preparation for the games. And it wasn’t just the colourful billboards that had taken over the city; on many streets, we saw diversion signs set up to redirect traffic throughout the games. Yet again, I began to understand the scale of the planning and execution that went into preparing an entire city for such a large-scale event.
Don’t let the angle fool you, the building was heaving with people all-day
A chance to be part of history
With the arrival of my uniform, my first day volunteering at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games is complete, and two delayed trains later I’m home. Sure, it wasn’t the easiest day, especially with it being the hottest day of the year, but I found the experience not only rewarding but fascinating also. It truly is amazing just how much goes into setting up and running an event of this scale. But with the eyes of the Commonwealth on our second city, it’s easy to see why nothing is being left to chance.
Whether it’s marketing, administration or (seemingly most important) IT and security, not a single element of the games has been taken lightly. Professional teams have spent years of preparation and planning for an event lasting just under two weeks, but as we have seen in just this briefest of glimpses, it was no easy feat. But thanks to companies like NVT Group (who I’m volunteering with), it was a Commonwealth Games to remember.
Ryan Bird, Young Co-operators Network member.
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