7. How much should we pay in care costs and how do we budget for them?

If you contact your local Childcare Information Services they should be able to give you some idea of the costs of different kinds of care in your area. You’ll find a link to your local services here: www.childcarelink.gov.uk/index.asp. As with other expenses, you may well want to set some kind of limit. However, you should bear in mind that volunteers will be caring for people with different levels of need and, as with all expenses, you will need to bear in mind individual circumstances before imposing a strict limit

Many organisations are still not in a position to be able to pay childcare or care expenses to volunteers. Few people allow for this expense when they apply for funding. It can be difficult to budget for these expenses when, for the most part, you are unsure of how many volunteers would need to claim this money. Organisations often choose not to, because they are afraid that it will make a volunteer expenses budget unattractively high for funders or that the extra money will not get spent if no volunteers need to claim it. Many organisations anticipate a need to put in the lowest possible budget, and to compensate for an underspend one year by lowering the budget the next. Many organisations equally choose to ignore the issue rather than attempting to tackle it. This is a shame, as it means that parents with small children or people caring for an adult are excluded from volunteering. In an article in Edinburgh Volunteer Exchange's summer 2001 newsletter www.volunteeredinburgh.org.uk/ Mark Steven argued that people on low incomes with pre-school children should be viewed as a socially excluded group. If you work from that assumption, then some of the systems currently used in the field of Equal Opportunities could be used for measuring and securing their involvement. Generally, a good performance indicator for Equal Opportunities would be to look at the percentage of a certain group within your community and to see whether the percentage of that group within your workforce is similar. For organisations with a more specialised client group, it may be better to look at percentages of different groups within the client group and try to work towards a staff/volunteer team that reflects this. Using this as a model, organisations could use the percentage of parents on low incomes within the community and/or client group to predict the percentage of volunteers who may potentially need to be reimbursed childcare costs if they are to be included. In this way budgeting for childcare costs would be less about guesswork and more about actively planning to involve a potentially excluded group.