Supporting someone with a mental health issue as a volunteer is not so different to good practice in all volunteer management. The following tips were put together through Capital Volunteering a London wide project that has now closed led by CSV and the London Development Centre. Do provide access to information around benefits, often people are on disability benefits and a move into volunteering can cause anxiety around this. Do build links with employment and training providers that might help people with training and support [...]

The Chances4Volunteering Forum is now open! We hope that you will find it a useful tool in your work. Please visit the following forum post which gives instructions on how to register: Joining Instructions Image Credit Wili_Hybrid

This week has been a busy one in the sector. As well as being Carers Week, it was also Small Charity Week, Refugee Week and Diabetes Week. And as if that weren’t enough, the Home Office this week announced that the ISA Vetting and Barring Scheme was to be put on hold: The Home Secretary Theresa May has confirmed that the comprehensive vettting and barring scheme, due to commence next month, has been put on hold and will be subject to review to bring it [...]

You may or may not have noticed a slight change to the menu options above. The Toolkit has started to take shape! The Toolkit pages are intended to be of use to volunteer managers and organisations wishing to set up a supported volunteering project. The toolkit will be split into sections, defined by the barrier you are working with. For example, there will be sections on Learning Disabilities and Mental Health. In each section there will be three subsections: Useful Links News and Research Resources [...]

After the Barriers to Volunteering event on the 6th May, we thought it would be a good idea to explain the purpose of this website and what we hope it will offer. Toolkit The toolkit will be accessed from the top of this page in the menu. There will be ‘drop down’ options for you to choose the subject you wish to find information on, and the type of information you are looking for. The topics for the toolkit will be as follows: Learning Disabilities [...]

Exploring the Barriers to Volunteering is a chance for volunteer-engaging organisations to come together and explore their options and potential for engaging with groups who are often excluded from meaningful volunteering experiences. The Chances4Volunteering Toolkit will officially be launched at the event and delegates will benefit from a brief introduction to the resource. Workshops Delegates will also be able to attend two of three workshops on the day, each covering a different set of barriers to volunteering: Mental Health (Mark Brown, Editor of OneinFour) Learning [...]

TheVolunteer Management Programme is well under way at Volunteer Centre Slough. This Capacitybuilders funded project aims to improve the quality of volunteer management. The project has the same broad aims for all 25 funded projects nationally however in Slough emphasis will be put on supporting and improving the skills of those who work with volunteers in the smaller, newly formed groups as there are many of those in the area. Many of those managing volunteers are volunteers themselves so are unaware of the importance of their [...]

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 [...]

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.