The course encourages you to think about and reflect on the following;

• What you need to know and who you need to speak to about how COVID-19 and it’s recovery phases
• How the current situation has affected your group or organisation, you and your volunteers
• What do I need to know about the volunteers’ experience?
• How to balance the benefits of volunteering, to a group, the volunteers, and the individuals they support, against the risk to those individuals and groups
• That the group or organisation fully understand their duty of care within its context
• Whether volunteers are ready to return and how the changes have affected them
• Whether the group or organisation is ready for them and has clear structures and process to safeguard volunteers and promote their wellbeing.

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. We would also hope that this course has highlighted some issues around Health & Safety for your group or organisation while involving volunteers. We hope you found the course and the resources and the Action Plan useful. Some final thoughts:

• Volunteering is a choice freely made;
• Listen to your volunteers;
• Not starting a volunteer programme is also an action
• Keep volunteers safe and take a precautionary approach to risk and developing a risk assessment;
• Keeping everyone safe and follow public health advice in your locality
• Check the resources signposted in section 5.3 Your Legal Responsibilities  for guidance and advice