The OSS is looking for more people to join our busy volunteer team: 10-20 swimmers worldwide with broad and various interests to help us #sharetheswimlove around the planet. Love swimming, love sharing? Jump in and join the OSS team.
Fancy joining us? Here’s how to apply.
The Outdoor Swimming Society (OSS) has always been home to renegades and mavericks, creatives, outliers and people who dance to the beat of their own drum. Now we’re looking to add another layer to our volunteer team – 10-20 more swimmers worldwide who can help us #sharetheswimlove and strengthen the global community in 2019.
Other than that it’s pretty broad, as you will see from who else is on the team. Your motivation is key: a core value on the team is the desire to promote swimming for it’s own sake, not as a way of promoting themselves or to gain a profile for themselves or a business.
You don’t need a following. We’re anticipating many Swim Champs will be instagrammers (so can literally #sharetheswimlove through images) but championing outdoor swimming is not limited to instagram – you could want to come on board to offer some service that The Outdoor Swimming Society community wants, a need that isn’t met.
Or you could just be doing something brilliant – we have one OSS Swim Champ so far, Lindsey Cole, who is currently cycling from Totnes to Scotland meeting wild swimming groups on the way.
But in the team there’s a wide variety of people doing a wide variety of things that make the swimming world more interesting, so the only prescription is – whatever you are doing is original and helps share the swim love.
A wide and varied volunteer team! Robert Macfarlane, Ross Edgley, Alastair Humphries and Calum Maclean and lots of equally brilliant people whose names you won’t recognise – foot soldiers who put time in behind the scenes to make life more interesting for other swimmers, keeping inland access, social media and our free written content going.
Check out the OSS Team page to read more about us. Championing individuality is a core value of The Outdoor Swimming Society so if you aren’t like anyone else, all the better. The unifying bond between us is our manifesto:
We believe swimming enlarges and celebrates the beauty of each day
We believe in sharing the joy and adventure of swimming
We believe all have a right to swim under an open sky
We believe in open access to lakes and rivers and in keeping lidos open
We believe clean water in our lakes and rivers is a fundamental right
We embrace the delight of cold water and its rejuvenating effects
We promise to strip and dip wherever we can
To read more about where we’ve come from and where we’re going, see Blazing A Trail.
The community currently has 70,000 followers, but we want to add some serious zeroes to that. We cherish variety – through us the poets and the channel swimmers mingle, and both can feel like they’ve had their eyes opened. The poets can pick up tips which change their adventures, and the speed freaks can learn the joy of stopping to look around. Through the Swim Champs we hope to bring the world more of that, and start conversations with groups who aren’t swimming at all.
Mostly be themselves. But in addition you will be asked to:
Applications are now closed.
Whether you get to wear the title this year or not, we are all champions in our own way – so thank you for your interest and please continue to #sharetheswimlove and consider joining us if we run this again in 2020.
Please apply knowing that selection is inevitably going to feel pretty random. There is going to be an element of gut feel and instinct, and the desire to maintain a broad base will influence the final mix. We want to continue to have specialist interests represented across the team, and have room for flashes of utterly non-essential-to-the-world but brilliant adventures or art.
We look forward to meeting you!