Supporting Volunteers
From LearningHearts
Volunteer support and management require specialist skills. It can be challenging ensuring tasks are complete where activities are unpaid. It can also be hard to set specific requirements such as quality controls or deadlines. In addition, the organisations running volunteer activity can face a range of specific legislative requirements such as charity law, safeguarding issues or government benefit restrictions.
Whilst maintaining volunteers motivation over long period can be difficult those willing to volunteer are often highly motivated to support the activity in question.
Many rural community groups are both volunteer run and led. This can present additional challenges but often represents the commitment of rural people to see thing happen in there communities. Although this is by no means universal and tasks for a wide variety of community activities and organisations can fall to a small number of active individuals.
Volunteer recruitment and succession planning is often an area where many community groups find it difficult to be successful. Succession planning is often left until a crisis point where key volunteers are lost. Often volunteer recruitment can focus on negative messages such as; ‘the venue will close without volunteers’.
Volunteers can be vulnerable individuals themselves and volunteering can be and important method of developing confidence, aspirations and skills. It is as important that volunteers benefit from community activities and understanding and communicating the benefits to the volunteer can be a highly effective recruitment mechanism.
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Case Studies
Volunteering England (English/England)
Volunteering England is an independent charity and membership organisation committed to supporting, enabling and celebrating volunteering and all its diversity. Volunteering England assists and promotes local Volunteer Centres which are local organisations who provide support and expertise within the local community, to potential volunteers, existing volunteers and organisations that involve volunteers. To find your local volunteer centre please click here Volunteer Centre Finder. For more information on Volunteering England visit their website http://www.volunteering.org.uk/
MOVISIE International (Netherlands/English)
Dutch volunteer organisations and their volunteers are supported by MOVISIE International on three different levels: on a local level by volunteer centres, on a provincial level by support centres, and on a national level by the government. MOVISIE gathers and disseminates knowledge relating to volunteer work on all three levels. Topics: the validation of prior learning, social entrepeneurship of civil society organisations, employee engagement and NGO’s, service-learning for secondary school students.
For more information visit: http://www.watiseer.nl/120303/eng/home/movisie_international/volunteer_effort/volunteer_effort_in_the_netherlands
Volunteering in Denmark (Denmark/English/Danish)
In Denmark, there are numerous organizations that offer support to volunteers. At the municipal level, any group of people who establish themselves as a union getting support for running their club.
At regional and national level, among others the following organizations:
- Danish Gymnastics and Sports Associations (DGI)
- The Volunteer Centre in Denmark
- frivilligjob where you as a volunteer have the opportunity to find available volunteer jobs. (in Danish only)
VOLUE (Netherlands & International/English)
In this learning partnership we want to develop and exchange visions on (validation of) non formal learning in voluntary work. We also want to develop guidelines for volunteer organisations. http://projectin.eu/volueworkgroup
