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.
3. Reopening your volunteer programme
3.1. Is this the right time
Groups or organisations looking to restart their volunteer programme from a stopped or scaled back position need to consider internal and external drivers before confirming whether they are ready to restart their volunteer programme or fully scale up. Restrictions placed on citizens and group or organisations by Government are in the process of being lifted and amended. In Scotland, the Scottish Government has published a Route Map to support decision making.
See figure (7) below, which sets out the different phases as we move from Lockdown to Phase 4 (the New Normal).
Figure 7: Scottish Government COVID-19 Route Map (Crown Copyright, with permission)
Finding your group or organisation on the route map is not straight forward. For example, if you are a UK-wide group or organisation, this adds a level of complexity as advice is different in different countries of the UK. You then need to look at how local restrictions and national Government implement the different recovery phases in relation to your operations. For volunteer practitioners, there is the additional pressure of thinking through what sector they fit into and the different roles that volunteers play in different parts of the group or organisation. The Volunteer Scotland cross-sector Action Learning Group people have shared concerns about:
- Which volunteer roles or tasks within a group or organisation apply to which phase of the route map?
- Has your group or organisation issued specific guidance relevant to your activities and or locality?
- Does your group or organisation expect you to make this decision, or does that responsibility rest elsewhere?
- Have your group or organisation considered updating policies and procedures? For example, the challenges around difficult conversations may include instances where a volunteer or staff member makes a complaint regarding an individual not following guidelines, e.g. social distance.
As a volunteer practitioner or a person who supports volunteers, you will need to assess three overlapping areas. You need to match your group or organisation’s requirements for volunteers with the number of volunteers potentially available to carry out those activities and any restrictions that may apply as we move forward out of lockdown and enter each recovery phase.