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
1.4. What will you learn?
We understand that not everyone who supports volunteers is a paid member of staff and that not all volunteer practice happens in big group or organisations. However, this course has been developed to support the functions to create a safe and positive volunteer experience, and we hope it will also be useful in smaller less formal group or organisations and community groups.
By the end of the course you will have:
- Considered if and when it is appropriate to scale up or fully restart your volunteer programme;
- Considered what needs to happen before and during any restart to your volunteer programme;
- Drawn on the core values and guidance around volunteer practice to keep volunteers safe;
- Reflected on how what can be learnt from the COVID-19 experience.