Though we don’t always submit regular blog posts to the site we do share a lot of information via the SV in the News page here on the site. That’s where you can find links to various bits of relevant news from across the UK. We do this by monitoring online mentions of  volunteering + any reference to a marginalised group such as disabled people, those with learning difficulties, refugees & the newly arrived or ex-offenders and them provide a link to the original story [...]

Capacity Builders’ Volunteer Management Programme‘s Strand C is now open for Expressions of Interest. That’s great, but just what does it mean? First, you need to understand just what the VMP is and Volunteering England have been kind enough to provide a 1-page outline of the thinking behind it. In a nutshell, it is a programme of three parts or strands: Strand A – Around £1.6 million to be pumped into local infrastrucure for volunteer managers – expect most of this to go to local Volunteer [...]

An Access to Volunteering Grants Pilot has been established by the Office of the Third Sector at the behest of the Commission of the Future of Volunteering. The plan is to distribute £2 million of grants across three test regions - Greater London , West Midlands & North West) – to increase the capacity of recipient organisations to support and/or improve the engagement of disabled people within their volunteering initiatives. The grants are intended for projects seeking to address barriers ranging from general lack of awareness [...]

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 [...]

No doubt those of you who check the site regularly will have noticed our recent down time (nearly two weeks!). The situation was initially caused by what became daily attempts by spammers to hack the site for their own purposes and the problems this caused not only for us but for our host service providers. Fixing this in itself would have only taken a day or so but we decided to take the opportunity relaunch the site and lay the ground work for a few [...]

There are many national surveys and much research in the UK and abroad that seek to define volunteering (here are just a few links) but we’re going to try and start from a simple common sense approach and try not to get too caught up in these definitions – there will be plenty of time elsewhere to consider policy and funding agendas and the role they play.

This is another clip from the Volunteer Films project on the Community Channel. I realise that this is a somewhat sheltered situation in that it brings together two organisations – MPEC and Mencap – who each have their own mission to support disabled people but it seems such a simple yet productive idea. If you have not heard of this project yet then please let us introduce Middleton Park Equestrian Centre a few of their volunteers. Things to listen for: talk of finding volunteer opportunities for young people [...]

The latest bits & bobs that we find in our work – some about supported volunteering, some about other related issues. As always thoughts and observations about any of these stories are welcome below in the comments section ********** This goes beyond just volunteering but the Paisley Daily Express gives us a enlightening story about Graham Watret , a young man with learning difficulties who demonstrates just what a person can achieve despite the barriers they face if given the right support. Not only has Graham [...]

Below is a link to a video entitled It’s About Time which was part of the Volunteer Films Project on the Community Channel. This clip was published in the spring of 2008 as part of the Time Banking Campaign which is sadly no longer live – but that’s not why it’s been included as this week’s Video Tuesday entry. The people in the video describe a system where individuals earn time credits by the hour for time volunteered and then are allowed to spend those credits by calling [...]

When we first conceived of this project one of the groups we wondered about was young people. Are they, in terms of common barriers to volunteering, a practical segmentation of our local communities or is the label or youth just too broad to work with? We will be exploring this question early in the New Year with Tim Davies’ peronal blog. Tim Davies of the organisation <em>Practical Participation. In the meantime, here is a video posted on youtube by Volunteering England earlier this year where [...]