This month Stephanie Willats tells us how a new project is helping Volunteer Centres offer effective support to their member organisations.
Picture this: it’s the July Committee Meeting and an item comes up about plans for the forthcoming AGM.
To everyone’s surprise, two long standing trustees announce their firm intention to resign at that meeting. Is the organisation suddenly one of the 93% of voluntary and community organisations that have between one and five trustee vacancies?
What happens next? Do the other trustees desperately try and convince them to stay on or do they spend days contacting everyone they know – and even people they hardly know – to persuade them to join the Committee?
Or, do the trustees calmly thank them for all they’ve contributed over the years, agree to carry out a skills audit at the next meeting and set about exploring the best ways to recruit new trustees?
Would the organisation have a good idea of where they could advertise for new trustees? Would that include their local Volunteer Centre?
If they approached the Volunteer Centre, would the VC be able to help them with ideas about creating lively role descriptions for trustees, ideas on promoting the vacancy and how the organisation could find out about best practice in induction and support for trustees?
Has your organisation taken on board that the trustee role is as much a voluntary role as any of the myriad of opportunities we can find on DoIt?
If any of these scenarios seem to apply to you, whether you’re a Volunteer Involving Organisation or a Volunteer Centre, a recent project of Volunteering England’s is designed to help you by providing a new resource on the VE website.
This project’s objective has been to help VC’s offer effective support to their member organisations around trustee brokerage through a new online resource.
Before starting the on-line resource, VE wanted to be as consultative as possible and included discussions with a wide group of VC’s around their current experience and what sort of support they felt they needed.
A key component of the project brought together eight Volunteer Centres, who had each already carried out some work around trustee brokerage, for a series of three Action Learning Set Meetings.
The aims of these Learning Set Meetings included feeding into the content of the resource, sharing information and materials, reporting back on work done as a result of the learning sets, and promoting the learning on trustee brokerage to regional and sub-regional VCs.
VCs attending the Learning Set and giving their valuable experience to the project were: Glossop, Gloucester, Tower Hamlets, Liverpool, Watford, Reading, Swindon and Waltham Forest. So if any of these VCs are in your region, do ask for feedback.
This section of the website will be online by the end of March, and focuses on providing practical tools and materials from within the VC network that VC’s can download and draw on.
VE hopes it will prove to be a useful tool to members developing trustee brokerage practice.
VE sees this as a work in progress and would appreciate any suggestions, offers of materials that could be added to the resource, and feedback from members to make sure this section of the site is useful.
There will also be a workshop at the VE Conference in April, focussing on trustee brokerage and how it fits in to VCQA, core functions on brokerage.
This project/resource is supported by the Governance Hub’s partnership programme work
For any further information on this project, please contact:
Patrick Scott
Training and Development Co-ordinator
Volunteering England
Direct Line Number: 020 7520 8955
Switchboard: 0845 305 6979
Mobile: 07921 700097
E-mail:
patrick.scott@volunteeringengland.org