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.
4. Adapting to Change: Roles and Responsibilities
4.8. Support and Changing Roles
Part of planning involves thinking through all the different components of Volunteer Scotland’s Volunteer Life Cycle (see Involving Volunteers) to anticipate what happens. So imagine your volunteer has decided to renew their commitment to volunteering with your group or organisation. They need to know they are welcome and supported through the process of returning to their role, which may have changed as a direct or indirect result of COVID-19.
At the same time, volunteer practitioners may need to balance the needs of their volunteers against the needs of their group or organisation. As part of Volunteer Scotland’s Action Learning Group practitioners have shared concerns about:
- Group or organisational risks including financial, reputational and legal uncertainties;
- Concerns about health and safety, which includes their own and volunteers;
- The loss of the expertise brought by volunteers caused by further absence;
- Worries about the potential impact of prolonged isolation amongst volunteers who may be vulnerable;
- Issues around the purpose and function of your group or organisation where volunteers are part of a commitment to engaging with people as volunteers to improve their life circumstances.
You may wish to engage with your board or leadership team to help you navigate these concerns. You may also wish to spend some time preparing the volunteer for the possibility that returning to their role may not be a straightforward process. Both volunteers and group or organisations may experience a ‘start-stop’ process due to ongoing effects and risks of COVID-19. For the volunteer, this reflects the aspect of choice within the Volunteer Charter – what sounds good initially may not suit them in practice, and they may wish to step back again for a while.
Support also means being able to let go. It may be the case that you, or the volunteer, decide that now is not the right time for them to return, or they have decided to move on from your group or organisation. If this is the case, you can support them to return for a further conversation at an agreed time to resume their involvement at a later date or progress them through your usual leavers’ process. Their feedback will be valuable in considering the impact of COVID-19 on your volunteering programme when you come to evaluate this at a later time.