VOLUNTEER STORIES

A Renewed Sense of Purpose

After more than three decades as a teacher, Lys Cleary expected retirement to bring a slower pace of life.

There was time to travel, to rest and to enjoy the freedom that comes after a long career, but she began to feel that something was missing.

“I've been retired for 10 years and although we did a lot of travelling, it just became not enough, you know.”

With her children living away and fewer day-to-day demands on her time, Lys found herself searching for something more meaningful, something that would reconnect her with people and give her a renewed sense of purpose.

That search led her to Manchester Museum.

Finding community again

Lys’s introduction to volunteering came almost by chance. Her husband had already begun volunteering and encouraged her to explore opportunities of her own, spotting an opportunity at Manchester Museum with only a day left until closing. Soon she found herself stepping into a new environment and what she discovered was something unexpected.

“As soon as I started speaking to people here, I realised what I’d been missing,” she says. “I felt like I’d known them for years and I really missed the camaraderie of the workplace more than I thought.”

After years in the classroom, surrounded by colleagues and students, retirement had brought a quieter and more solitary rhythm. Volunteering gently reintroduced that sense of connection and shared purpose.

Recognising the value of experience

Through her role at the Museum, Lys has also rediscovered the value of the skills she developed over a lifetime. What once felt routine has taken on new significance in a different setting.

“You think of the thing that you do on a daily basis as being commonplace and ordinary.” she explains. “One of the valuable things about volunteering is that I appreciate the skills that I’d forgotten were skills,”

Her background in teaching, particularly with secondary school students, has proved especially relevant. Whether engaging with school groups or speaking with visitors across a range of ages, she brings confidence, clarity and an instinctive ability to connect.

“School parties will come in with a group of year 10 lads,” she says. “I know how to talk to them, I know how to get them interested in what I'm telling them.”

More than that, it is her ability to communicate ideas in an engaging and accessible way that shapes her approach and leaves a lasting impression on those she meets.

The power of storytelling

At the heart of Lys’s work is storytelling. During object handling sessions, including her work with Triceratops: Eat, Roam, Repeat and the story of ‘Leopold’s lunch’, which looked at the diet of Leopold, the Triceratops within the exhibition, she focuses not simply on presenting information but on creating a narrative that visitors can follow and remember.

“I like to see a line running through it,” she explains. “If you tell kids a story, it sticks with them.”

This approach reflects her background in English, but it also speaks to something more universal about how people learn and connect.

“Telling a story is part of human development,” she says. “All cultures have developed storytelling, that’s how we evolved as a species.”

By turning objects into stories, she brings the Museum’s collections to life in a way that feels vivid, accessible and memorable for visitors of all ages.

A people centred experience

For Lys, the most rewarding aspect of volunteering lies not only in the objects or exhibitions, but in the people she meets each day.

“I'll go for a walk round and I'll chat to people on the way around. And I say, I always ask them, even as a member of staff, ‘what's your favourite thing [in the Museum]?’ [Personally] I'm very fond of the little Egyptian sock. I'm also very fond of the cast of the woman from Pompeii, that really speaks to me.”

From welcoming visitors to guiding them through the Museum, her role is shaped by conversation, sometimes brief and sometimes more in depth, but always grounded in genuine connection. These everyday moments, though often small in themselves, build into something larger, a shared experience that connects people across backgrounds and generations.

Learning and adapting

Transitioning into volunteering has also brought new challenges. Moving from a position of authority in the classroom to a more open and exploratory role required a subtle but important shift in mindset.

“Being a teacher for more than 30 years, I was used to being in a position where I was the person who was telling other people things from a position of strength,” she says.

Learning to feel comfortable with uncertainty has become an important part of the journey, allowing space for curiosity and shared discovery.

She says, “Here, I’ve learned to be more comfortable saying ‘I don’t know’, but have you seen this?”

This openness has supported her continued growth in confidence, even in unfamiliar areas such as Egyptology, where she is now preparing to take on new object handling responsibilities.

A lasting impact

Now 67, Lys describes volunteering as both energising and deeply rewarding, something that has reshaped her experience of retirement in ways she had not anticipated.

“It’s been really rejuvenating,” she says. “It took me 10 years to get around to volunteering and if I’d known it was like this, I would have volunteered much, much sooner.”

It has also expanded her social world, bringing her into contact with people of different ages and backgrounds and offering a renewed sense of engagement with the world around her, remarking on a friend she made of a couple of decades younger that became the ‘Ant’ to her ‘Dec’ when working in the exhibition space.

At home, too, volunteering has added a new dimension to daily life, creating new conversations and shared experiences through sharing volunteering stories with her husband and family members in person and through a blog she has begun to write.

Encouraging others

For those considering volunteering, Lys offers thoughtful encouragement grounded in her own experience.

She says, “If you like people, it's the job for you… Don't be afraid to move out of the comfort zone and if you can talk to people, you can do it. If you can just meet every single person with a smile.”

It is that openness that defines the role. And for Lys Cleary, it has turned volunteering into something transformative, not just a way to spend time, but a way to feel part of something again.