‘How am I supported?’ activity

In the next activity you are asked to think about the support your organisation offers their volunteers.

Activity 7

Thinking about what support is appropriate in your context, you may want to reflect on:

  1. Risks and ‘health and safety’ factors and how these are addressed.
  2. What kinds of support are available on a day-to-day basis to promote volunteers’ individual wellbeing?
  3. What are the long-term plans to support volunteers, including developing knowledge and skills?
  4. How are any specific support needs that relate to a person, their role or their individual circumstances addressed?

As you reflect, also think about when and where the opportunities present themselves to address any of these issues with volunteers. Have you asked volunteers how they would like to be supported? Remember it has to be proportionate for your context and right for the volunteers.

Don’t forget to note your thoughts in your learning journal.

Discussion

Support might seem like an unnecessarily formal approach, more suited to large organisations with structured volunteer programmes. However, promoting wellbeing and creating a safe and supportive environment is important in all volunteering situations as it helps to ensure a positive volunteering experience, which in turn will help individuals feel valued and motivated.

For volunteers, having a good understanding of where and when support is available will help promote wellbeing and it can also help if things are not going well. James talks about volunteers having a key contact for delivery and support from a person higher up in the organisation if needed.

Download this video clip.Video player: James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.
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Transcript: James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

James
Also, in terms of how we support our volunteers, every volunteer will be given a named member of staff that’s their key contact, that’s typically the personal that they interact the most with throughout their volunteering. So if you are volunteering with a youth group it would be the youth worker that runs that group that will be your key contact. That persons there as a kinda day-to-day contact if you’ve got any questions, but also the key worker will check in with you every once and while, maybe have a one to one every now and then, or just get a sense of how you are doing. All our volunteers also have a named line manager, so that’s a member of the management team and it would be probably the head of department or the manager responsible for each area of work that the volunteer is involved in. So that’s somebody who has kind of an overview of the volunteer’s progress, how well are they being supported, how they are getting on with their day-to-day activities. And then finally there’s me, so as the national volunteers manager, am available to all volunteers. I am that person, if they want to just pick up the phone, have a chat, if there is anything they want to suggest as an improvement, if there’s anything that doesn’t feel quite right for them or that they are worried about or anxious about, I try to be there and help guide that process as well.
End transcript: James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.
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It is also worth considering how flexible and inclusive you can be to adapt roles to support individual volunteers and enable them to find the best role for them. In this clip, Tania at GALE describes finding a role for someone who lacked confidence interacting with members of the public.

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Transcript: Tania, Volunteer Co-ordinator, GALE. All rights reserved.

Tania
I have several examples of responding to individual needs. Because we are a small organisation, we tend to tailor all of the roles to volunteers. So we had one woman who came to volunteer with us, she lived on a boat for about 9 years. She become use to her solitude and wasn’t really very use to being around people, so had some anxiety about that, and really did not want to be doing anything where she’s directly working with the public. So we were able to work with a member of staff responsible for different jobs like in the stock room and office base work, so we could development enough work for her to come and do some on a volunteer level.
End transcript: Tania, Volunteer Co-ordinator, GALE. All rights reserved.
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4.1 ‘How am I supported?’

4.2 ‘What have I achieved?’