‘Be ready’ continued

We involve volunteers because it’s really strongly connected with our ethos. It’s a community garden, it’s run by the community for the community. The community benefits but the community also involves themselves, it’s their ideas and aspirations that inform what we do. But it’s also their energy and enthusiasm and skills and knowledge that take the project forward.

So, there are lots of reasons why we involve volunteers at LGBT Youth Scotland. One of them is to ensure that our services are able to meet the needs of LGBT young people. We also find that volunteers bring a really diverse range of skills and knowledge and experiences that we might and often don’t have in our staff time. So volunteering is a great way to bring all those extra talents, those pieces of knowledge, into the organization. Another reason why we involve volunteers is that it’s a really good way to increase our contact with the communities that we serve. So, in terms of the values that inform our volunteering programme, we have a strong sense that volunteering benefits the volunteers themselves, it also benefits the organization and most of all it benefits our young people. We believe very strongly that volunteers should not replace paid staff roles and we keep a very clear distinction between the two about what we ask of volunteers and what we ask of our staff members. We also think it’s really important to try as much as we can to make sure that the costs of volunteering are met by the organization so that volunteers should never be out of pocket for their volunteering. Another thing that’s really important to us is to make sure that our volunteers come from a wide range of backgrounds and abilities because we really want to make sure that volunteering is as accessible as possible and is open to everyone. That we get the benefits that different people bring regardless of their backgrounds or their abilities.