The Special Olympics is truly a bona-fide international event but it’s athletes often require a little more care and attention. This article gives a great example of how professional services for events of this nature can be safely provided by the voluntary sector.
If you have a story about Volunteers providing a service in exceptional circumstances we would love to hear. Get in touch at info@smarterindesign.com.
The role of the 3rd Sector in the delivery of Health and Social care may be the only long term way to ensure some services survive. This fantastic article from Sarah Swindley, Chief Executive, Lancashire Women’s Centres outlines some of the major problems but also shed some light on the potential benefits.
How do we best define and articulate the role of the voluntary sector in health and social care? I’ve been asking myself that question increasingly regularly.
I run Lancashire Women’s Centres – a medium-sized regional charity working across a number of areas, including health, social care and criminal justice. As well as being a charity, we are also a company, a provider delivering NHS contracts and part of a private-sector-led criminal justice supply chain. The boundaries between the sectors are so blurred they’re becoming hard to see. However, we retain at our heart a set of core values to offer the best services to the most vulnerable in our communities and to have the basic aim of putting ourselves out of business by not being needed any more.
In 2013, Lancashire Women’s Centres was the overall winner of the GSK IMPACT Awards, funded by GSK and run in partnership with The King’s Fund and awarded annually to recognise and reward charities doing excellent work to improve people’s health. One of the key benefits of winning this award is the opportunity to join a growing and formidable network of past winners. As a group, we regularly get together to build our leadership skills, to share challenges and solutions and to shape our relationship with The King’s Fund, the NHS and the wider health and social care system. The knowledge and expertise we bring from running a range of successful health charities is there for commissioners and policy-makers to use and draw from. But how far is this expertise recognised?
The external environment since we won has changed fairly dramatically, with integration of health and social care becoming one of the key challenges to be addressed by the NHS five year forward view. However, despite the recognition in the Forward View that ‘voluntary organisations often have an impact well beyond what statutory services alone can achieve’, from the discussions we’ve had locally and nationally, it appears that the third sector is still poorly represented in successful integrated partnerships. Why is that? How do we better articulate our ‘offer’ and how it fits into an integrated model?
There are some considerable barriers to integration. Looking from the sidelines I see the practical issues – pay scales, organisational culture, information-sharing and measurement to name a few – which mean local authorities and clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have difficult conversations ahead. Bringing volunteers into the picture as recognised assets who will support outcomes in health and social care and add to workforce capacity is only just starting to happen.
When thinking about writing this blog, I hosted a roundtable for local health leaders from CCGs and public health – to gauge their view of the sector and understand how they saw us fitting into the developing plans. It was apparent that there is a definite appetite and willingness to engage with the third sector, although lots of energy has been spent trying to find a single point of contact, which seems to be causing some paralysis. Working through consortia and partnerships goes some way to addressing this, but I wonder if the same would be asked of the private sector?
Much of the third sector is well able to operate with maturity in a competitive market place. The skills and delivery models within the sector go far beyond delivering volunteer-led services to older people, vital though this work is. Third sector organisations provide flexible and diverse services within health and social care, reaching and benefiting communities often most distanced from statutory services.
I would like third sector organisations to be treated as providers that are already modelling integrated commissioning. Lancashire Women’s Centres work holistically across silos to reduce individuals’ vulnerability and help them to reach their potential. If you help someone to free themselves from debt, improve their literacy, live safely without fear of abuse, then as a consequence their health improves, their management of their long-term conditions improves, their attendance at A&E reduces, and their risk of suicide decreases. Commissioners are starting to understand that.
There is a view that what the third sector offers can be replicated and driven from inside the NHS, that community programmes can be bolted onto clinical services. I would argue this is the wrong way round and is the most expensive option; I advocate getting clinicians out and into communities. My vision for Lancashire Women’s Centres over the next couple of years is for us to have access to GPs that ‘belong’ to the service users – who will be able to prescribe medication or send for X-ray in a responsive way that fits those with complex needs who might not turn up for an appointment because they are scared to go out in case the bailiffs come, or are so wracked with anxiety they can’t get out of the door.
So let the third sector be round the table when plans for communities are being shaped – we understand this is no guarantee of future funding, but we have links to communities and patients that can help shape services in new ways.
Version 6.2 is an interim release adding some sought after features and all the usual small fixes and improvements. It went live at the start of July, some of the new features include the following:
Provider Profile Page
EDIT profile page
Providers can now create their own web page which can be viewed by users even if they are not registered on the system. All they have to do is goto PROFILE > YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE from their menu bar. Here they can upload their own profile images and descriptions, and preview what it will look like before they save it.
We have also added the ability for opportunity providers to set a custom website address making it much easier to promote (see right).
The providers custom web address looks like http://demo.volunteerkinetic.com/profile/custom-name-here
The biggest change was adding the ability to automatically link new volunteer registrations to an opportunity provider via the providers profile page. This is great for situations where an opportunity provider may need to communicate with a particular group of newly registered volunteers, even before they have joined any of their opportunities.
This is being used right now for schools, whereby each school directs their pupils to their profile page, when the pupils register by clicking the REGISTER TO ACCESS THESE OPPORTUNITIES button (see below) they automatically become LINKED to the school. The school can then contact all their signed up pupils and direct them to their new opportunities or add them manually, they can also track which pupils have signed up and how many hours they have logged on the schools opportunities.
Note: Providers can view all volunteers who have previously joined one of their opportunities via the MANAGE VOLUNTEERS > YOUR VOLUNTEERS screen, they can also view volunteers who have been LINKED to them either by the administrator or by registering via a providers profile page, by going to the MANAGE VOLUNTEERS > YOUR LINKED VOLUNTEERS screen.
PREVIEW profile page
Dont worry, all volunteer information and logged hours are recorded on your system in the normal way, the only difference is the volunteers are automatically linked to the provider. This new approach encourages providers to promote their profile page, which will in turn promote your system and increase your volunteer workforce.
Geographical Grouping Of Volunteers
Finding and grouping volunteers is especially important for our national customers. There is now the ability to search for voluntees in a pre-defined geographical areas. All you have to do is upload a custom area file that matches postcodes to your functional areas, be it counties, cities or something more abstract like north, south, east and west. You can also use this search criteria to send group emails to specific volunteers.
Other new features;
maximum age for an opportunity as well as minimum
its now impossible to remove (delete) an opportunity that has recorded hours
Search for volunteers depending on whether they have opted in or out of weekly emails
Keep an eye out for the V7 article which covers the major changes coming with the next version of VolunteerKinetic where it will morph into TeamKinetic, our new integrated solution.
Another year and another Volunteer week flies by. This year the team here at VolunteerKinetic decided to look at our customers to see some of the amazing work they did to support this important week in the Volunteering Calender.
Glasgow Life started us off with a great campaign that celebrated the importance of volunteers, using VolunteerKinetics new “Thumbs Up” feedback the team up in Glasgow ran the #bigthumbsup where people were asked to post tweets and pictures of the people who made a difference in their communities. The response was amazing with literally 1000’s of big thumbs up from groups right across the city. We really loved this picture of Judy Murry with some of the amazing tennis volunteers.
In Greater Manchester the guys at GreaterSport and across the 10 local authorities used this opportunity to soft launch the brand new GreaterManchester Volunteer Improvement Programme or VIP as we are calling it. GreaterSport ran a series of articles showing how their staff have all come from Volunteering, Karens Story is a really good example for all graduates who want to get a job in sport.
Manchester VSB was re-branded to become Manchester VIP with news letters and events across the city to get more people signed up and volunteering, and just weeks after launch Wigan VIP smashed through the 100 volunteer mark on the back of thw work they have done since joining the VIP. Over the next few months we will be tracking carefully the joined up work across Greater Manchester involving the Universities, CSp, the local authorities and some of the NGBs.
In Cardiff the team at Cardiff Met continued their amazing work, teaming up with Park Run and Save the children as well as focusing on recruiting more women and girls on to their programme. Gareth at Sport Cardiff always puts on a great show for Volunteer week.
Here at VolunteerKinetic we did not want to be left behind, with all this good work so all the team got out and got involved, I personally committed to join my local football team committee, whilst Rolf continued his work with the guys at the Manchester Softball league. Next year our aim is to make Volunteer Week an even bigger success, I hope you are all here to join us.
Kathryn Edwards is NCVO’s volunteering development team assistant. She assists with projects supporting NCVO’s work on volunteer management and good practice and plays a key role in helping to organise Volunteers Week. Kathryn also supports the Investing in Volunteers Quality Standard, working with organisations attaining the standard.
This week we celebrate Student Volunteering Week. This is a great time to recognise their significant contribution to the wider community, and to pay special attention to them as an invaluable source of time, talent, skills and creativity.
Having proudly volunteered and worked within a student volunteering charity, I’ve seen the extent of the role that student volunteers play throughout a city’s volunteering infrastructure. There were many essential roles fulfilled by diverse and energetic student volunteers, mostly benefiting people outside of their university. Research by IVR shows that 95% of student volunteers are motivated by a desire to improve things or help people, ranking higher than developing skills (88%) and gaining work experience (83%).
My top tips for involving student volunteers in your organisation.
1. Getting the opportunities right
Student volunteers have differing requirements, whether that is time commitments, varying skills or interests. Providing a broad range of opportunities will help you to recruit and retain them.
Be aware of their academic timetable and provide opportunities outside of the normal working day.
An NUS report states that the main barrier for students who do not currently volunteer was not having enough time; students said they would like to see more one-off opportunities to encourage them to volunteer. Student Volunteering Week is a perfect time to run one-off ormicro volunteering to give potential volunteers a quick snap shot of volunteering with your organisation and could potentially lead to students volunteering on a regular basis.
2. Create opportunities that develop skills
Think about what skills and experience the volunteer will need and gain from particular opportunities and include this within the volunteer role descriptions.
Even though a large majority of student volunteers are motivated by the desire to make a difference, developing their skills and getting work experience in meaningful roles is key to attracting student volunteers.
Opportunities that have skills which link with their academic course may seem more appealing to potential volunteers. The NUS report states that 40% of students said that education institutions linking volunteering opportunities to their course or academic qualification would encourage them to do more volunteering.
3. Provide clear and accurate role descriptions
Volunteer role descriptions must provide an accurate idea of the work the volunteer will be doing to avoid any misunderstanding. It should identify why the role is needed and the benefits to both the volunteer and the organisation as identified in the Investing in Volunteers standard.
Think about how you might adapt a role to meet the volunteer’s skills and requirements. Being able to provide materials in alternative formats, for example, audio and easy to read versions, can be extremely useful when trying to engage a diverse range of volunteers – which leads me on to…
4. Engage a diverse range of student volunteers
Think carefully about where you promote your volunteering opportunities. Is there a volunteering hub within the university/union to promote your opportunity? If not, try and build relationships with the Student Union and departments within the university to engage a diverse audience. Look at promoting in shops, cafes, libraries, magazines and newspapers that students regularly use and read. Think about the different groups and activities they might be involved in.
You could also work with existing student volunteers to spread the word. Ambassadors can provide real examples of their volunteering experiences and can help to produce creative recruitment messages that appeals to that audience. Using social media can help to share these messages through stories, photos and videos, and are a powerful way to inspire, engage and sustain student’s social action.
NUS research shows almost half of all students found out about volunteering opportunities through friends and family, with their place of study the second most common source of finding out about volunteering opportunities.
5. Support your student volunteers
Support and consistent communication is key to retaining volunteers. Volunteers should be provided with:
a point of contact
the opportunity to attend regular supervisions
group meetings.
This also provides an opportunity to regularly recognise the contribution they have made.
In order to retain volunteers, they must feel valued and supported. The quality of support and communication they receive can determine how effective they will be as a volunteer.
Work with volunteers to clarify their interests and what they would like to gain from volunteering – this will help you to offer them the right kind of role and opportunities to develop.
Half of the UK workforce would be given three days’ paid leave each year to volunteer, under Conservative plans unveiled on Friday. Every public sector worker and anyone working in a company with at least 250 employees – more than 15 million people in total – would be entitled to the volunteering leave, David Cameron announced. The Prime Minister said the pledge is “clearest demonstration of the Big Society in action”.
A series of high profile business figures welcomed the new plans for paid volunteering leave.
Mike Rake, chairman of BT, went one further than the Prime Minister, describing corporate volunteering as a “triple win”. He said it was “a win for the community, a win for individuals doing the volunteering, and a win for companies”.
“We welcome the Prime Minister reminding us of the importance of business to society,” he added.
Peter Cheese, chief executive at the CIPD, the professional body for the HR industry, said: “Our research shows that corporate volunteering benefits society, as well as businesses through building stronger roots with the communities they work in and serve, and engaging and developing new skills in their employees. It’s great to see this agenda being championed.”
John Cridland, Director General of the CBI: “Businesses encourage their employees to volunteer in the community and should do even more to increase this. It is a win win for everyone concerned”
Bear Grylls, the adventurer and TV presenter, also backed the plans, saying: “Firm Government support that enables millions to volunteer is a huge step forward towards building solid communities all around the UK.”
However, not everyone supported the idea. Lisa Nandy, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Civil Society, said: “Giving every public servant three extra days off could cost millions of pounds but there’s no sense of how it will be paid for. If just half of public sector workers took this up it would be the time equivalent of around 2,000 nurses, 800 police and almost 3,000 teachers.”
Some business groups are in little doubt that the policy will hit companies’ bottom lines. As Simon Walker, director general of the Institute of Directors, put it:
“Businesses should support their staff if they want to volunteer, but the architects of this idea cannot pretend that forcing firms to give an additional three days of paid leave will do anything other than add costs. This announcement not only undermines the Tory record on reducing business regulation, it also puts additional pressure on public sector employers, and ultimately the taxpayer. Frankly, the essence of volunteering is that it is voluntary. The IoD would welcome proposals to incentivise and make it easier for companies to facilitate volunteering, but it has to be a choice.”
Ryan Bourne, head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, was even more trenchant in his critique the Conservative’ latest plan to increase volunteering:
“This is another example of politicians imposing burdens on business and taxpayers for the sake of sounding caring. At a time when everyone is telling us that the NHS and other services are overstretched, the idea that it should be a priority to allow public sector employees to take three days off for volunteering elsewhere, funded by the taxpayer, is ludicrous.”
What does it mean for the voluntary sector? Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of NCVO, and Asheem Singh, director of public policy at Acevo, think this is a exciting proposal for the voluntary sector and businesses.
Etherington said: “Many charities urgently need more volunteers to support their work, while volunteering is an excellent way for employees to develop skills and confidence that will benefit their employers. Anything that helps encourage our culture of volunteering is very welcome. We look forward to seeing the detail of the proposal.”
Singh said: “It recognises the crucial role of charities in building a better society. The workplace is a new frontier for social action, and this new legal right will help support a new generation of socially responsible citizens.”
However, some people on Twitter question the Conservatives’ agenda with this policy, arguing that it is just another way to fill gaps in public services.
Oonagh Aitken, chief executive of CSV, said: “As an organisation with an established employee volunteering programme, we know the benefits to employees, the workplace and communities.”
She does, however, argue that: “If this policy is to be implemented, it highlights the need to invest in volunteering organisations so that the best use is made of employees’ skills and interests when they do volunteer.”
The key question is how to make all this work for the charities – traditional team building initiatives (such as fence painting) can be a drain rather than a boost so the challenge is to design something more meaningful that can be completed in three days. Most successful schemes take a lot of resource to set up well and often a broker is required to develop something that is mutually beneficial for both businesses and charities. Volunteering in a more collaborative and flexible way, for example allowing employees to choose causes they care most about, or being able to ‘pool’ their volunteering days. That way the volunteering has greater impact on the charity, is more engaging for the volunteer – and yields greater benefits for the business will be key to this policy leading to Volunteers rather than the Volun-told. It seems certain that the Big Society is still very much a controversial subject.
More than £42m has been axed from councils’ sports and leisure budgets since 2010, a BBC survey has revealed.
Among the regions which saw the biggest losses were London and north-west England, which saw cuts of more than £12.3m.
Sports stars and charities said they were concerned cutting facilities was “short-termism” that could impact on communities’ health and fitness levels.
The government said it was investing in grassroots sport.
Some of the biggest cuts occurred in the North West, where Liverpool City Council closed Woolton Swimming Pool, saving more than £3m.
In the West Midlands, which saw £9.6m of cuts, the region’s only 50m pool – in Coventry – was among the facilities to face the axe.
And in London, where budgets were cut by £8.8m, Mornington Crescent Sports Centre in Camden was among the facilities to close.
In other regions, Sheffield lost the Don Valley Stadium, where Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill had trained, while Newcastle-upon-Tyne saw the closure of its City Pool in 2013.
David Moorcroft, the Commonwealth Games gold medallist and former chief executive of UK Athletics, said: “In times of cutbacks to public services, rightly or wrongly, sport and leisure is one of the first things to get cut.
“It’s really unfortunate because the health and happiness of the nation and communities is based around being able to access facilities that encourage people to take physical activity.
“Ultimately, if we are trying to reduce obesity among young people, you can’t really have clubs and volunteers doing all that work. Once a facility is lost, it’s gone forever. When you come out of recession, it’s very difficult to rebuild it.”
Emma Boggis, chief executive of the Sport and Recreation Alliance which represents sports governing bodies in the UK, said she had “some sympathy” with local authorities “and the extreme financial pressures they are under”
“But reducing investment in sport and in leisure facilities is storing up problems for the longer-term,” she said.
“Limiting access to leisure facilities will result in greater inactivity and bigger costs to the NHS in terms of tackling conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and depression.”
Sports and leisure spending since 2010
North West
-£12,372,959
West Midlands
-£9,638,972
London
-£8,891,367
North East
-£7,147,948
East
-£5,114,871
East Midlands
-£5,038,980
South West
-£3,347,463
Yorkshire
-£3,209,581
South East
£12,340,287
Total
£42,421,854
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said £1bn of public money had been invested into grassroots sport through Sport England.
David Sparks, who chairs the Local Government Association, said councils had had “little choice” but to squeeze budgets.
“The reality is that, within a few years, well over half of the council tax everyone pays will have to be spent on social care,” he said.
“With demand on these life and death services continuing to rise and funding from central government continuing to fall, councils will have little choice.”
If you saw our post about the Labour Manifesto, you might be wondering what the other parties are bringing to the table! This is a very brief summary of the main policy points in the Lib Dem and UKIP manifestos we think you in the voluntary sector will want to know about.
Liberal Democrats
The Liberals have a strong theme of support for social action and community rights throughout the manifesto. Ruth Driscoll, Head of Policy and Public Services at the NCVO welcomes “their focus on early intervention” “which would better support vulnerable people and would lead to long-term cost-saving”
Improved incentives for work programme providers, many of which are voluntary organisations. To update the Lobbying Act to draw on Lord Hodgson’s work is also seen are very positive.
The manifesto recognises the value of the public having a voice in decision-making. The voluntary sector’s role in providing and enabling this must be protected though it is not clear how this will be done.
UKIP
UKIP have said they would like to energise the voluntary sector in the build-up to this manifesto, but what does that mean? They are committed to scrapping the National Citizen Service, repealing International Aid, reducing the cabinet office spending on ‘big society projects’ and scrapping the Defra Waste resource action project. They believe this will save £250 million in the first year.
They would replace these projects with the funding of 800 food banks and local advice centres, a veterans administration that would coordinate the work of existing charities and most interesting is the funding of “community agents and the voluntary sector” although specific details are very thin on the ground.
They also claim that by leaving the EU they would be able to offer more VAT relief to charitable organisations on some services and products.
In summary
What is clear, is that all parties recognise the importance of the voluntary sector, especially in a time of economic difficulty and for the poorest in society. There do seem to be some real differences in how they think the sector should be funded and governed, and the role of government in that process. Whoever wins, I think the sector is going to see even greater change over the next parliament and will need to be ready to adapt.
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Another year and another Volunteer week flies by. This year the team here at VolunteerKinetic decided to look at our customers to see some of the amazing work they did to support this important week in the Volunteering Calender.
More than £42m has been axed from councils’ sports and leisure budgets since 2010, a BBC survey has revealed.