‘I want to feel welcomed and encouraged’ activity

So we started off by sort of looking at the other organizations and how they developed their inductions. We do an induction into the organization and all the details of that to start off with as part of the initial informal meeting. And then the different members of staff from the different departments then looked at what they needed from volunteers. And we looked at as well, you know to make sure, the differences between volunteers and staff, so volunteers aren’t taking on responsibilities that really should be for staff. And so, we developed those inductions that way. So, when a volunteer comes with us, after they’ve had their registration of interest, followed by an informal chat and they have a more formal induction to the organization as part of that. And then when we’ve worked out what role they would be interested in they then go and have a taster session which is also an induction into that area of the organization.

When we developed our induction training, our starting point was to look at what would our volunteers need from us in order to get the best possible start in volunteering. And we also thought about what skills and what knowledge do we need our volunteers to have in order to ensure that they can do the role they’ve chosen as well as possible. And actually, I was there when we did that and I ran an exercise with our management team, there were post it notes everywhere there was lots of discussion in small groups. They came back with a huge big list and then we kind of together just whittled it down to some essentials. So, the Induction training that we have for volunteers, the kind of compulsory training tat volunteers have to do before they can start is in 5 parts and it’s a modular exercise. All volunteers have to attend part one which is the organizational induction so information about LGBT Youth Scotland and also some background information about what’s it like to be a young person living in Scotland, some of those facts and figures. For volunteers that are going to be involved in youth work or working with young people there are other parts. So, we have a half day group work training, we have a half day one-to-one skills training. There’s a half day session on trans, intersex and non-binary young people. That’s often the part that a lot of volunteers identify for themselves they have the biggest knowledge gap around. And the final part of our five part induction training is the protection of children, young people and vulnerable adults, so what most people would refer to as child protection training. There’s a lot of other training that we make available to our volunteers, we’ve got an annual training calendar and it just rolls throughout the year and staff and volunteers can sign up to whichever sessions they feel are important. So, things like mental health, sexual health I mean there’s all kinds of things there that people can learn about. But our five-point induction training is compulsory for all volunteers working with young people and the introduction session is compulsory for all of our volunteers if that’s admin, or policy work, research work, if they’re ad hoc volunteering.

So the way that we deliver the training is across different weekend days. They’re usually delivered on the weekend. So our next session for example is in February, we’ve got two Saturdays in February and then two Saturdays in March and one of those is a full day and that’s how we fit the 5 half day modules into that. Training is provided by different staff. So often I provide the child protection training. Our youthwork staff are heavily involved in the training as well, it’s really great to get their skills because these are the people that work day in day out with young people. So, they’re great people to deliver our group work training and our one to one training. The working with trans, intersex, and non-binary young people, the youth work staff bring a lot of their own expertise into that as well. And we hold the training around the country so typically one of the sessions would be in Edinburgh, one would be in Glasgow, one in our Dumfries office and one might be in Dundee or Stirling so we try and do a bit of north, south, east, west, around Scotland that means that everybody has to do a bit of travel and hopefully everybody has one session that’s quite near to them as well.