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.


1. Introduction

1.1. About this course

The course has been inspired by the recent COVID-19 experiences. There is no doubt that COVID-19 has and will continue to have a significant impact on the operations of charities and volunteering. For example, a report for the Charity Regulator in Scotland OSCR suggested in June 2020 found 51% had lost fundraising income, 66% of groups with more than 11 staff had furloughed staff, and 32% had reduced the number of volunteers they had, and this appears to be an emerging pattern throughout the UK.

As a response to these challenges there is a wide range of support available for group or organisations during this COVID 19 period, including an evolving set of resources at SCVO, Scottish Government, UK Government, Age UK, NHS Scotland Inform, H&S COVID 19 page, NCVO, WcVA, Volunteer Now, at Volunteer Scotland and with health information about COVID 19 on the Open University OpenLearn website and more specific material about leadership and management in the context of a pandemic.

In many ways, we live in quite an information-rich world, and one of the issues is making sense of what applies to us in our context. The course aims to introduce the essential things you might need to consider to ensure a positive experience for individuals initially returning to engage in volunteering or scaling up your volunteer programme following a period of suspension or low levels of activity.

 Please remember this course is related most closely to the Scottish context. Still, the overarching principles can be applied to the rest of the UK and the international community, in conjunction with your local and national governments most up to date policy and advice.