To support your volunteer’s mental health and wellbeing, it is important to ensure all your volunteers are happy and content and you are doing all you can to sustain their wellbeing and create a supportive environment for the volunteers. Showing the volunteers that their mental health matters to you can also help retain volunteers. Ensuring you have a well-maintained relationship with volunteers means they will feel more comfortable raising any concerns with you.
Ways To Support Your Volunteer’s Wellbeing
Provide your team with information about bettering your mental health and wellbeing and letting them know that support is available. Mind offers some information about this on its website which can be found here.
Strengthen The Relationships With Your Volunteers
Make sure you have strong relationships with your volunteers. Well-maintained relationships can reduce stress and increase happiness, engagement and overall health. According to NCVO research shows that a feeling of belonging is important to people and can help motivate them.
You can strengthen relationships with volunteers by encouraging team-building activities and creating opportunities for people to come together in person and online for example socials or regular informal meet-ups. You can also keep in contact with volunteers by using our new automated emails feature in our 2.2 update which allows you to send automated emails so volunteers will get a message wishing them all the best on their birthdays and thanking them for volunteering. You can read more about what else is included in our 2.2 update here.
Create A Mental Health And Wellbeing Policy
Ensure you have a mental health and wellbeing policy. Having a policy shows what actions you’ll take to support staff and volunteers’ wellbeing. In the policy, you can include things like how you’ll respond to people who disclose a mental health problem. NCVO have suggested St John’s Ambulances policy as an example which you can gain ideas from for your own policy.
Use The Wellness Action Plan (WAP)
Volunteer Now suggests using the Wellness Action Plan (WAP) as a way for Volunteer Managers / Organisations to support the mental health of their volunteers.
WAPs are a personalised tool that can be used to help us identify what keeps us well at work and the support we would like to receive from our manager to boost our wellbeing. You are able to fill in a Wellness Action Plan template on the Mind website.
Connecting With Your Volunteers
Get to know your volunteers, ask them questions and show interest by asking what their hobbies are or what their motivations are for volunteering. This can help build healthy relationships and allow you and the volunteers to be more comfortable around one another and volunteers are able to feel more freely about voicing their concerns.
Have Regular Informal Catch-ups
Have one-to-one informal meetings or check-ups with your volunteers if possible or just regular check-ins via email and make sure to actively listen to your volunteers, and seek out their thoughts, opinions and feedback. NCVO have a one-to-one meeting template that you can use for inspiration.
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