Community Action Suffolk knows that this is a challenging time for Volunteer Managers/leaders/coordinators. Whether you are employed to manage volunteers or it is part of another role or you are a volunteer yourself, we have developed a range of sessions to help you. Our courses are based around the concept of the Volunteer Journey: Plan, Include, Support, and Celebrate.
The Journey helps you to plan how you will involve volunteers within your organisation or group – what additional value will they bring? How will it be different from paid roles? How will you enable creativity and responsiveness? We will help you to be more inclusive in recruiting your volunteers. What can you do differently? How do you involve your wider community? How do you increase the diversity of your volunteers?
To support your volunteers well, we will encourage you to think about your processes – can you be certain that every volunteer does get thanked? How do they feel welcomed and appreciated for the time that they are gifting to your organisation or group? Can you be confident that every one of your volunteers would recommend volunteering with you to their friends and family (this will help with your recruitment!). Finally, celebrate! How do you show off the impact that your volunteers have made? Do you capture the stories and share them with your stakeholders?
“I think the course covered (quite appropriately!!) more E & D than I was expecting and has opened my eyes to the wider context of social inclusion, within which ‘volunteer recruitment is a part. I can now see that looking at volunteer recruitment as a process can unintentionally create barriers to active inclusion.”
We offer the Volunteer Journey in two short courses Part 1: Plan and Include and Part 2: Support and Celebrate. While you can do these courses standalone, we recommend booking onto both so that you can appreciate the full journey. In response to the challenges you are facing due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are reducing the cost of these courses to £10 per place for the next few months!
To complement the Volunteer Journey, we offer three specialist sessions on Law, Innovation and Challenging situations. In these, you will understand the legalities of including volunteers, be inspired to be creative and innovative in how you involve volunteers and give them space and confidence to help shape your service and finally tools and tips to avoid things going wrong or what to do if they do. Again these courses are reduced to £10 a place for the time being.
“Thank you so much, I cannot tell you how enthused I am again. I had lost my drive a little so I am really happy that I did your course! It was really helpful to have the booklet to fill in and the action plan is perfect. Quite often you can feel excited during training, but then once it’s over it’s hard to remember everything. I am glad I could fill it in and take it away to refer to again.
We look forward to seeing you on these courses very soon, and in the spirit of innovation, we welcome your suggestions for new courses – what would you like support with? Contact our training officer faye.smith@communityactionsuffolk.org.uk for a discussion.
Visit www.communityactionsuffolk.org.uk to find out more about us, the full offer of our training to the voluntary sector and to join the network and keep up to date with the voluntary sector and communities.