Keeping Volunteers Safe: Restarting your Volunteer Programme
This course is about the essential things you need to consider to ensure a positive experience for individuals returning to engage in volunteering following suspension of programmes in response to Covid-19. The overall aim is to help you prepare your volunteers, organisation and colleagues to return to supporting volunteer involvement in your work. It was developed with input from volunteers, volunteer-involving groups and organisations, volunteer practitioners and trainers. This input has given us the volunteers’ perspective and the volunteers’ ‘voice’ that we hope you will find helpful throughout the course.
1. Introduction
Figure 1: Volunteer Scotland (All Rights Reserved)
The course will introduce the key questions that groups or organisations should reflect on as they think about re-starting their volunteer programmes. The course will help you prepare your volunteers, groups or organisations and colleagues to return to supporting volunteer involvement. However, the current situation and how individuals and group or organisations respond to COVID-19 allows us to start to explore the broader topic of “Keeping Volunteers Safe”.
The course has been developed with input from volunteers, volunteer-involving groups and groups or organisations, volunteer practitioners and trainers, specifically the Volunteer Scotland Action Learning Group. The COVID-19 situation is very fluid, and therefore, this course will be organic, it is not a complete or finished course, and we will develop its content over the next few months as the current situation changes. (Please remember to adapt this information into your local context and seek out the relevant government advice for your locality of operations).