Keeping Volunteers Safe: Restarting your Volunteer Programme

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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.


4. Adapting to Change: Roles and Responsibilities

4.10. Summary

It is essential to consider why your volunteer role has to restart or scale-up and consider that some volunteers may be anxious about restarting. You will need to deal with this tactfully remembering that many volunteers may not wish to engage in volunteering at this time. Based on discussions with practitioners, Volunteer Scotland has developed the following quick checklist.

  1. Where? Make it clear for the volunteer where they should report, and what new arrangements are in place for their arrival. Do they need special equipment? Whose role is it to provide this? If their role has been changed to at-home participation, what are the expectations around dress code, IT equipment and appropriate spaces?
  2. When? Should the volunteer allow extra time for accessing the building safely or at a designated time slot? If your volunteer usually travels by rail or bus, would they need to use a car instead? Will this add to travel time? Can they continue to claim petty cash for expenses on the day or is another system in use?
  3. How? Have additional safety measures been put in place for the delivery of the role? Will it be delivered in the same way? Is refresher training needed, or a pre-activity briefing?
  4. Who? Should the volunteer report to a specific individual, or will the volunteer practitioner be available to welcome them back personally?
  5. What? Some volunteers may want to know what is in place to support them to return to their role. You may want to allocate some time to go through revised policies and procedures with them.
  6. Why? Similarly, having a clear sense of purpose behind operational changes means a greater sense of buy-in and compliance from the volunteer. Check that the rationale is clear or prepare to spend time contextualising the changes for the volunteer, and check that they have understood.
  7. What? Questions are relevant to your situation, and where will you seek advice.

Activity 6

Please take some time to consider the following points and if appropriate update your Action Plan:

The checklist above is a series of critical questions you will need to ask as you support your volunteers to return to their volunteer activity. You may have already asked yourself some useful questions that are not captured above, so please add as you see fit.

However, what we ask you to consider here is how prepared is the group or organisation to address those questions, are the appropriate structures and process in place to be able to enable volunteers to choose to volunteer.

  1. Note three actions that you want to take from the learning in this section. Prioritise these and write the most important one into your final action plan at the end of the journal;
  2. You might have thought of something that wasn’t significant enough to write in your action plan, which you could do quickly and would improve the experience for volunteers;
  3. Have you had discussions with your volunteers about the process of starting in the spirit of keeping everyone safe and following public health messages?

There is no feedback for this activity