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.


5. What to do Next

5.2. Follow Public Health Advice

The course touched on this earlier when considering risk assessment and health and safety. Noting the challenges associated with ensuring you track changing information advice and guidance. Not only is this advice changing as people understand more about COVID-19 and move through the different recovery stages, but we also see changes in direction with some places easing restrictions and others tightening them.

Changes like this lead to uncertainty, uncertainty for those supporting volunteers around how to plan and manage operations, and crucially uncertainty for volunteers. Managing that uncertainty is part of your “Duty of Care” to volunteers and staff. However, ensuring the group or organisation and its operations follow relevant Public Health guidance is also about the group or organisations place in society. Public Health information advice and guidance is there to protect everyone, and this means the group or organisation Duty of Care extends beyond staff and volunteers.

This broader responsibility means decisions need to be mindful of the broader impact that operations may have. A useful analogy is the precautionary approach or principle which developed from the environment movement in the 1970's. The basic idea of the precautionary approach is that not knowing whether something is harmful or dangerous is not the same as knowing it is safe. It is a way to deal with being uncertain or not knowing the harm something might do and suggests that when we are unsure, we need to evaluate the evidence around the risk versus the benefits.

These ideas have moved from the environment to inform discussions on Public Health. The World Health Organisation has set out how it can be applied to Public Health issues. The basic idea is that just because you are uncertain or do not have any evidence that something may cause harm does not mean it might not be harmful. For example, academics in the British Medical Journal suggesting early in COVID-19 (April 2020) that precautionary principles needed to be applied to dealing with the pandemic and encouraging people to wear face masks. At the time they wrote the article, there was very little peer-reviewed research that demonstrated masks were effective. They suggested that being unsure whether they were effective or not was a reason not to use them.

What we are suggesting here is that you apply this principle to thinking through how to match your volunteer programme onto changing Public Health advice. At the time of writing, there is no advice for volunteers, and volunteers perform a range of roles that may touch on advice across different sectors. As a volunteer practitioner, it is worth thinking about how they apply in your context in relation to this precautionary principle.