Workshop notes – looking at the mechanics of SV

Below is the presentation we used during the Creating Chances4Volunteering workshops held in Guildford and Slough this past summer. We had 33 attendees sign up for the two days representing over 20 volunteer-engaging organisations – many those were fellow members of the chances4change consortium. The workshop was aimed at organisations who either did not have SV in place or who were looking to improve an existing project.

An abbreviated outline of the presentation might look like this:

• A few of the major players in supported volunteering in the UK over the last 5 years
• A simple definition of volunteering and the distinction between formal & informal volunteering
• An outline of the fundamentals of volunteer management that an organisation should have in place before moving on to SV
• Discussion of where is the support in supported volunteering – 4 proposed models of SV
• Outline & rules of a couple group exercises – the most notable involving teams being asked to build a SV initiative given pre-defined resources (watch for a separate post on this!)

We know that you can only take in so much from the slides themselves without the commentary they were written to support so please feel free to post any questions below and we can expand further on any points you wish to explore.

You can find a .pdf version of the presentation here and a list of the links to resources mentioned in the presentation should be useful (we’ll also be covering many of these in more detail soon):

• Capital Volunteering (Legacy Fund)
• Goldstar
  • Good Practice Toolkit
• Mentoring & Befriending Foundation
  • Making Mentoring More Effective (SOS)
  • Peer Mentoring Toolkit (Refugee Action)
  • Building the evidence base for mentoring and befriending (M&BF)
  • Risk management guide for mentoring and befriending services (M&BF)