Dave Thomas, Volunteering Development Officer at NCVS, writes occasional blogs, reflecting on practice development for Leaders of Volunteers. In this latest thought-piece, Dave attempts to answer his own question...

 

Leaders of Volunteers will have heard me saying "What’s in it for me?" in training sessions, network meetings and, seemingly at random, in other conversations. It's not that I'm totally self-centred. I'm always asking the question from the volunteer's (or potential volunteer's) point of view.

On Thursday 29 June 2023, we opened the doors at Nottinghamshire County Football Ground for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire's first Social Prescribing Conference.

Your volunteer training has a monetary value. Are you making the most of it?

Whether a new volunteer joins you to make the tea for your group meeting or becomes one of your trustees, they will need some training. There probably isn’t a volunteer role anywhere that doesn’t need some initial training or induction.

NCVS is working in partnership with Historic England to lead on a new Heritage Buddies Project. This is an innovative pilot project to test and trial an approach to delivering social prescribing and wellbeing through heritage in local settings, across Nottingham City.

The Volunteers' Week 2023 Celebration Event took place on Saturday 3 June in the Arboretum, where 30 organisations came together in the sunshine to celebrate together.

It was a fine, but slightly chilly morning at 8am when the first Nottingham City Council and NCVS team members arrived to set up. The crew from the gazebo company were setting up the rows of stalls, the Portaloos were delivered and very soon the first of the stallholders arrived.

Have you heard of the Nottinghamshire Crisis Sanctuaries service? Launched in 2021, the vital service provides mental health crisis support to local communities across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.

On Thursday 11 May 2023, we held our first Nottingham City Place-Based Partnership (PBP) Race Health Inequalities Summit. The event, led by Nottingham Community and Voluntary Service (NCVS), brought together leaders from across Nottingham to discuss how race affects people’s health outcomes, the healthcare they receive, and what steps we can take as a partnership to address these inequalities.

Dave Thomas, Volunteering Development Officer at NCVS writes...

For many years, some employers from all sectors have been willing to give their staff paid time to take part in volunteering. Some voluntary and community organisations have embraced this and have involved volunteers effectively in this way. Others have found it very difficult, or even impossible, to engage with this kind of volunteering.

Dave Thomas, Volunteering Development Officer at NCVS writes... 

From my own involvement in this process, I am fairly confident that this is not another top-down attempt to regulate volunteering.

I was one of more than 350 people involved and Nottingham CVS was one of more than 300 organisations that attended some of the 14 workshops. I was also interviewed as part of the consultation. (I even have a namecheck on the Vision for Volunteering website).

We interviewed our new colleague, Ebenezer, to learn about his volunteer journey and how he came to work with NCVS

Ebenezer first saw an article about the Community Champions Volunteer role with the Majority Black Led Churches (MBLC) project run by NCVS. He was particularly interested in the work the project was doing to engage with Black communities about Covid-19 vaccination misconceptions and misinformation and to support greater take up across this community.