This month, Jim McCallum, Volunteering Director at Voluntary Action Leicester (VAL), reflects on how Leicester Volunteer Centre has developed.
For more than 40 years Leicester Volunteer Centre has been plying its’ trade in the centre of Leicester.
An early customer, Margaret Harrison, volunteered with Social Services, looking after children while their parents were talking to social workers. Often, when they emerged from the office, they would say, “Well. She said to me ‘How about doing such and such?’ Well, I didn’t know . . . . “ And from this experience she realised there was a gap in the market for a charity to support parents around the edge of, and particularly before the need for, social workers.
Unlike most of us, she didn’t just think ‘someone should do something about this’, she went away and founded Home-Start UK, now a multi national charity.
Not all Volunteer Centre users at Leicester have that ambition, but as all of us know in the volunteering industry, the humble and the high flyer are alike in their willingness to do things for others, and it is a privileged place to work.
In the last 10 years, the Volunteer Centre has prosecuted a business model of grafting on additional projects to broaden or deepen volunteering: broaden in the sense of opening volunteering to a wider market; deepening in the sense of bringing greater quality to bear.
In this way projects have been added to support people with mental health issues to volunteer, people with learning disabilities, people in particular disadvantaged areas of Leicester; people with physical difficulties and people looking to go from long term unemployment back into the workforce.
As a tactic it has been fairly successful, although most projects have been for limited duration; only ‘VALUES’, the project to support individuals with a learning disability, and ‘ACE’, a project to help young people experience all aspects of citizenship, becoming self-sustaining in their own right.
Current ‘graft-on’ projects include being a Vinvolved provider and supporting organisations involved in sport the better to involve volunteers, and likewise, more volunteers themselves to become involved in sport.
A particular challenge for VAL specifically and Leicester generally, as host to the GB-wide 2009 Special Olympics for people with a learning disability, is to recruit 1,500 volunteers, including some highly capable and motivated Venue Volunteer Team managers, but in all seeking some 1,500 volunteers including 10% with learning difficulties
A challenge we face in Leicester is to bring out the creativity and the commitment of the many stakeholders in volunteering together, most of whom have volunteering as a minor item in their in-trays. It’s not a complicated discussion in that there is goodwill towards volunteering, but converting the goodwill into higher priority, and above all resourcing, is a key need.
Another challenge is to promote volunteering through effectively involving volunteers in innovative and high profile initiatives wherever possible. Recently VAL undertook research with partners Leicester City Council and De Montfort University into community cohesion. By going out on a mini commissioning round, community groups such as youth groups and faith groups, provided volunteers to undertake door-to-door questionnaires and focus groups in return for a donation to their funds.
This worked as an exemplar of citizens connecting with each other as well as volunteers stepping in to do the work in a way which had more integrity perhaps than using student or market research labour.
Challenges for the future include getting out of short-term funding cycles; promoting volunteering as strategically important to the city, and breathing life into areas where volunteering can make a contribution but is not funded to do so at present. Bids to enable people with a learning disability to explore aspects of citizenship, and to help people recovering from injuries or with chronic illnesses to volunteer with OT support as a way of managing pain, are two examples of recently failed bids.
But the star of volunteering, it seems, has never been higher politically, so the opportunities have perhaps never been greater: now, what can our spin be on ‘Volunteering and the credit crunch: opportunities and threats’?
