Become a volunteer


Volunteering with GMFRS

We have so many different opportunities for everyone to get involved, whether you’re looking to meet new people, develop your skills, improve your CV or build on your knowledge, you can do this all whilst volunteering for one of the largest fire and rescue services in the UK.

Safety Centre Volunteer

This is an exciting new volunteering opportunity available at Bury Training and Safety Centre to deliver tours for schools and members of the community. This interactive journey at the Safety Centre gives an exciting and immersive learning experience for our visitors to learn how to protect themselves against fire, and other dangers in the home, on our roads, and around water.

Recruitment is now open until 29 June 2025!

GMFRS Safety Centre Volunteer (external website)

Volunteer Cadet Instructor

As a Volunteer Cadet Instructor, you will support the delivery of a programme of activities, (classroom, drill yard activities, teambuilding, fundraising etc), ensuring compliance with relevant Fire Cadet guidance and helping our cadets gain a qualification through classroom and practical activities.

Recruitment is now open until 29 June 2025!

Volunteer Cadet Instructor (external website)

Community and Support Volunteer

As a Community and Support Volunteer you will be trained to play a key role to help reduce risk of fire, road traffic collisions and water incidents by engaging and educating members and groups in our communities and to support our operational crews, prevention education staff, and our partners. You will also be invited to support Charity events and act as a live causalities at operational exercises.

Recruitment is currently closed for the Community and Support role but you can still register your interest and we will keep you informed when it reopens.

Community and Support Volunteer (external website)

Please note: Volunteering roles are not associated with applications to be a Firefighter. Volunteer activities do not include any Firefighter duties, and the volunteer team cannot advise on Firefighter applications, or taster sessions.

If you are interested in Firefighter recruitment, please visit our join us page.

Anyone 16 years of age or over.

  • Join one of the largest Fire Services in the UK
  • Learn about GMFRS
  • Support the GMFRS Mission: Saving lives, protecting communities, working together
  • Learn about fire, road and water safety
  • Share or learn new skills, gain experience, grow in confidence and develop your communication skills
  • Improve your employability
  • Support our education programmes
  • Make friends and meet new people from across our diverse communities
  • Receive training relevant to your volunteering role and opportunities for personal development
  • Volunteer uniform provided
  • Out-of-pocket expenses paid
  • Give something back to your communities
  • Do something different!

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Volunteers are an integral part of our service.

Their support helps to increase our capacity and reach and they bring with them additional skills, knowledge and diversity to complement our workforce.

In the last year, volunteers have provided over 3000 hours of support.

Volunteers support our community engagement activities, helping to deliver fire, road and water prevention education messages and promote the online home fire safety check.

There's also an increasing demand for volunteers to support operational training exercises.

In the last 12 months, we've carried out around 20 exercises that has included marauding terrorist attack, high-rise, breathing apparatus, road traffic collisions.

And we ran one large scale chemical exercise at Bury that included the release of a chemical on a tram.

And it's really important that we have people acting as casualties, and that's the value that the volunteers bring.

The demand for exercises is going to increase over the next few years, so I think it's really important we recognise the value that the volunteers bring.

Firstly, to obviously improve the training we can offer our crews and then secondly to really sort of improve our operational response and how we respond to the communities in Greater Manchester.

We've got a new volunteer strategy now. I'm really excited to say that early in the summer, mid-June, we expect to be opening our recruitment process for volunteers that will increase our capacity and offer some fantastic opportunities for people to get involved.

It will be a lot more widely accessible and ensure it's creating and offering more purposeful and meaningful roles for everybody to get involved, do something in the community, learn new skills, meet new people.

So, we're very excited and we've already got lots of people who are very interested in joining us.