Sport umbrella organisations: local, county and regional.
This section is designed for
- Local sport forums
- Community Sports Networks (CSNs)
- County Sports Partnerships (CSPs),
- Regional Sports Boards (RSBs) and
- as well as other sport organisations interested in engaging at regional or local level.
These pages will give you advice and suggestions on how to improve sport volunteering. These will be from a groundwork of strategic partnerships through to operational action. Some of these actions and partnerships you will already be working on. In which case let us know and then move onto those that you aren't.
More information about Volunteer Centres working with sport:
Volunteer Centres work locally, and many of them also work sub-regionally and regionally. The purpose of the engagement is ultimately to improve volunteering in sport at a grassroots level. The pages that follow contain examples, articles, links and further information about how these organisations are already engaging across England.
The head of sport volunteering at Volunteering England has this message:
"Volunteering England and Sport England are encouraging a strategic approach to engagement that is sustainable, co-ordinated and replicable across both sport and volunteering sectors. Therefore, if you are a sports body looking to meet targets that have come from government, you should be ready to fund the specific services you need from the Volunteer Centres, and likewise, they should be ready to explain what their services and costs are to you. This is the case with Volunteer Centres working with large health organisations, for example, PCTs. However, as with small health groups working with Volunteer Centres: if individual local sport organisations approach a Volunteer Centre, they should be treated in the same way that any local community group would be: invited to work with the Volunteer Centre if they are willing to improve their volunteer management.
This is where the investment in sport volunteering is needed: in the volunteer management. If clubs are not able to improve this on their own (and recent research has shown the need for better volunteer management in sport), then the umbrella bodies and ultimately, the government funding for sport should work together to address this need.
Volunteer Centres can work with you on volunteer management, but because of the large amount of local sport organisations who need to improve their volunteer management, the Volunteer Centres will need to significantly increase their capacity to deal with sport specific targets. This is where joining up with the CSN, CSP and governing bodies as well as Local Authority sport development team makes a lot of sense. The one area of sport development that has never been managed strategically is the volunteering. This strategic approach is now needed and there has been no better time to make the most of the engagement between Volunteer Centres, Volunteering England and community sport than now".
