In order to successfully recruit and support volunteers with support needs, there needs to be some planning before the recruitment process takes place. This planning is needed to ensure that your organization is accessible and ready to take on volunteers with additional support needs.

Awareness

Firstly, you will need to ensure that the rest of your staff and volunteers are aware of why you are taking this step and what it means for them. Will some volunteers or members of staff be expected to offer additional support to volunteers? If so, do they have the knowledge and training to do this? As human beings, we tend to stick with what we know. We associate with people who share interests and experiences with us and therefore some staff members or volunteers may never (to their knowledge) have worked with someone with an additional support need.

There may be real fears and some unease amongst staff and volunteers around offering support in a number of different areas. A large fear will be around ‘getting it wrong’ or ‘saying the wrong thing’. Ensuring that the people in your organization have received awareness training in some of the common barriers to volunteering will help allay some of these fears and lead towards a smoother process.

Policies and Procedures

When was the last time that you looked at your policies and procedures?

When looking at policies and procedures, you will need to look at them with your volunteers in mind. Are they understandable to someone with a learning disability or a literacy issue? Are they available in different formats and on different coloured paper?

Easy Read

It may be useful to create new copies of your policies in an ‘easy read’ format. This will benefit both your current staff and volunteers as well as new volunteers with learning disabilities and literacy issues. Contact your local branch of Mencap to find out more on how you can use Easy Read to make your documents more accessible.

Braille and screen readers

Visual impairments vary greatly, as do people’s needs. In order to assess which format your volunteer prefers, it is always best to ASK THEM. Despite the common assumption, not every blind person will know how to read braille. Many of those with visual impairments now use assistive technology on their computers. Screen readers will read out any text (and punctuation) to the reader. In order to make sure your policies and procedures are accessible, ensure that they are formatted in plain text. Removing any text boxes, tables and tabs will make it easier for a screen reader to interpret. This also makes it easier to put into braille if needed.

Unless you are printing large amounts of information in braille, it may be easiest for an organization to just print what it needs via a third party who specializes in this service. Local support organizations for the visually impaired will sometimes offer this service. Alternatively, if you contact the RNIB, they do offer this service.

Formatting policies and procedures so that screen readers can read them is a little easier. If you know how to use them, use the ‘heading’ options in your word processing software. This creates a ‘map’ of your document which a screen reader can interpret and will allow volunteers to skip to the section they need much easier. Remove tables, text boxes and images and ensure section headings are clear and descriptive.

Other formats

Other formats you should consider are large print, audio format and printing information on different coloured paper. Printing documents in large print can be done in house quite easily. It is always advisable to ask the volunteer which size print suits them best. This also goes for volunteers who have dyslexia. Those with dyslexia can often find that printing information on different coloured paper and a different font can make it much easier to read. As a guide, the easiest to read font for those with dyslexia and literacy issues is Arial, and a good colour of paper to keep in stock would be yellow.

If you would like to keep any information in audio format, you can either do this in-house, or the RNIB can offer this service. Local Universities will sometimes have a small department transcribing books into audio for students, and your local community may have a ‘talking newpaper’ service. You may be able to approach them and negotiate using their services for a fee.

These are just the first steps in preparing your organization to work with volunteers with additional support needs. These tips are not just for organizations offering supported volunteering, but are good practice for all volunteer involving organizations. These small changes and checks may take a little time. However, the time they will save you in the future is immeasurable. With these small things in place, your organization will be showing a real commitment to supported volunteering and to good volunteer management in general.

image credit: JakeCaptive