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
3.7. Activity 2 Feedback
You might have spoken to your volunteers, or you may not have had the opportunity to do so. Either way, you probably thought about how different volunteers might expect different things. Some are probably keen to get back. For those mainly working outdoors like Sustrans, they found because their volunteering is outside,
“…most of their volunteers are keen to get out the house again!”
Others found more variation. For example, the Royal Blind has spoken with their volunteers and have discovered
“…that for the most part their volunteers tell us they are keen (some even impatient) to come back”.
However, even within the enthusiasm to get back and start making a difference, the Royal Blind found individuals were concerned about others, in particular the welfare of our older and otherwise COVID-19 vulnerable service users. Royal Blind found that while most were not concerned about themselves a
“…small number of volunteers have talked about their own existing health conditions and let us know that they will not be able to volunteer in-person for some time due to COVID-19”.
For Royal Blind, the main thing was to show they were listening and cared about the wellbeing of volunteers. What practitioners have told us that these conversations are not primarily about encouraging people to come back but about listening to volunteers experiences as part of the decision making process about whether the organisation is going to restart is the programme and whether volunteers are ready to come back.