Another day, another lockdown. Lockdown 3.0 is upon us and we know the volunteering world are just waiting to read about the new guidelines from the government. We have found some useful information in regards to volunteering during this lockdown. Each is relevant per country…
As this is a fast changing situation, please make sure you are checking for latest guidance from your national government and/ or infrastructure body.
England
A ‘reasonable excuse’ for leaving your home includes volunteering – you can also leave home to provide voluntary or charitable services, where it cannot be done from home. For further guidance, see below:
Examples of reasonable excuses to go out include to provide voluntary or charitable services, but only where that cannot be done from your home. For further guidance, see below:
Tthe new rules allow volunteers to go out to provide care or help to a vulnerable person, including emergency help. This includes getting food and medicines for them. For further guidance, see below:
Where possible, you should volunteer from home. If you cannot do so, you can volunteer outside your home, if you are able to meet the regulations and guidelines applicable at that time. For further guidance, see below:
An exciting, in-depth look at how to use TeamKinetic on a day-to-day basis to run your volunteer programme. Partly hands-on, your tutor will talk you through setting up opportunities and allow you to see the system from different users perspectives. At the end of this training session, you will have a good understanding of how each user interacts with the system and how to communicate and manage your volunteers and service providers.
Who Should Attend?
Either new employees who have taken over the role of administrator OR existing administrators who would like a refresher of all the main functionality.
What does it cover?
Volunteer Life Cycle
A practical session where attendees will experience the system from each users perspective covering the following:
Registering as a provider
[As a provider/admin] Creating an opportunity
Registering as a volunteer
[As a volunteer] Joining the opportunity
[As a provider/admin] Managing and communicating with volunteers on the opportunity
Managing Volunteers
Searching for volunteer/s
Search filters explained
Adding volunteers without an email address
Inviting volunteers onto the system
Criminal checks
Volunteer groups
Meetings and Inductions
Recognition and Rewards
Achievement badges
OpenBadges
HourTrades
Managing Opportunities
standardising activity tags
Shared opportunities
References
Events
Accreditation badges
Reporting and Insight
Reporting library explained
Exporting information
Effective Communication
Notifications
Volunteer news
Sending volunteers an email or text
Volunteer/Provider bulk emails
How to get Help
Support tickets
Contextual help
Questions and Workshops
Any questions will be answered and workshopped in the final segment, helping you to apply what you have learnt to your own unique programme.
How do I sign up?
You can access this training from your HELP > EXTRA TRAINING menu. Purchase the number of credits you need and then click on the BOOK button and select your course and dates.
You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’
Who doesn’t love a good competition? We certainly do!
With COVID-19 still looming, we are determined to help companies boost staff and volunteer morale with a little help from the spooky season. That is why we have created a list of 7 different ways you can lift the (spooky) spirits of those you work with. And, we are want YOU to send pictures in of your organisation getting involved with any of the 7 ideas below; the most creative one wins our ‘trick or treat’ prize. But, you only have until the 1st of November to send your creative pictures in.
1. Get Creative
Whether you are working from home, or still in the office, that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative for Halloween. Why don’t you decorate your desk (or work from home space) with some spooky decorations? This is a cheap and fun way to ensure you can still make the most of the haunting holiday, despite COVID-19 restrictions. You can even make it a friendly competition and reward the person with the spookiest desk!
2. Get Fancy…Dressed
Whether you are still in the office, working from home, or volunteering, you can still make a show-stopping appearance in some fancy dress this Halloween! You could even do spooky make-up too.
We are currently working from home, but I know I will still be dressing up this Halloween. Why don’t you get speaking to your volunteers and employees to encourage them to take part in some fancy dress this year? You can even make it another Halloween competition. Have a look at some popular inspiration below.
Velma and Daphne from Scooby Doo
The Purge make-up
Cobweb make-up
Mary Poppins and The Chimney Sweep
Breaking Bad
3. Low-key spookiness
Fancy dress and make-up not your thing? Don’t worry. You could simply wear some spooky socks, a terrifying tie, a Halloween headband, or a scary scrunchie. And if you’re working from home, you can even just wear some Halloween pyjamas at your desk, whatever gets you in the positive spooky spirit while COVID-19 is about.
Terrifying Tie
Halloween Headband
Scary Scrunchies
Spooky Socks
4. Carving Out Spooky Competition
One thing that screams Halloween fun to me is pumpkin carving. Mine is currently on the table staring at me as I type this, ready to be carved along to a spooky film. Even with COVID-19 still lurking about, this is still something you can get your staff and volunteers involved in. You can make it a fun competition over a Zoom call, perfect for keeping things COVID-19 safe whilst also boosting morale.
5. Ghoulish Games
Did somebody say…quiz?! If there is one thing we love at TeamKinetic, that is a good quiz. Especially one that fits in with the festive holidays. This is another idea you can use to boost the morale of your staff and volunteers. You could arrange a Halloween quiz over a Zoom call and do your quiz over a PowerPoint presentation?
6. Bewitching Baking
With COVID-19, actual baking may not be possible. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase some spooky cakes to give out to your volunteers and staff. This is a perfect way to encourage some spooky spirit in a minimalistic way. These could be cakes, biscuits, chocolate apples, you name it! In fact, take a look at a few of your options in supermarkets now.
Spooky Mummy Marshmallow Lolly- Tesco
Spooky Muffins- Tesco
Freaky Fondant Cakes- Sainsbury’s
Deadly Cupcakes- Sainsbury’s
Cadbury’s Pumpkin Patch Cakes- Sainsbury’s
7. Spoooky Social Media
Holidays such as Halloween acts as the perfect opportunity to put your company in the spotlight for getting involved in festivities through social media. You could redesign your logo and header picture for October? We use Canva to make our profile look spooky; take a look at what we have done below and it may spike you with some spooky inspiration.
TeamKinetic Twitter- @TeamKineticUK
Inspiring Each Other
Everything is uncertain right now, with a lot of things being cancelled and many of us beginning to work from home again. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t all inspire each other to still enjoy the upcoming holidays. Share these ideas with your staff and your volunteers, send your pictures in before the 1st of November, and we can make sure we use Halloween to boost morale! And, one of you will be lucky enough to win our ‘trick or treat’ prize!
Micro-volunteering is the idea of volunteering in ‘short bursts’. This means volunteering in short and convenient ways, at times and places which suit everybody’s schedule. What makes micro-volunteering different from standard volunteering is that it can be done online or face-to-face, and doesn’t require any long term commitment. This means that the volunteer also doesn’t have to go through an application or training process first. Micro-volunteering is perfect for both volunteers and organisations! It has the potential to attract a wider diversity and greater number of people, including individuals who wouldn’t have got involved otherwise due to conflicting schedules.
Delivering supplies to those isolating from covid-19
Signing online petitions
Writing blogs
Retweeting and posting relevant content to social media
Two minute litter pick
Buying a homeless person food or a hot drink
Researching and completing online surveys
Donate old clothes and goods to a charity shop
Remember this..?
Remember when the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral in the summer of 2014? Where everyone, including big celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, would tip a bucket of ice water over their head to raise awareness of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
Well, this was a perfect example of micro-volunteering. While this wasn’t classified as your ‘typical’ volunteering, it engaged people all over the world and encouraged them to donate their time and resources into raising awareness of ALS. This viral challenge raised $116 million over two years from people engaging in this challenge who previously might not have got involved if it wasn’t for micro-volunteering.
How has COVID-19 impacted this?
The rates of micro-volunteering will have naturally increased from COVID-19. This comes from people having too much spare time and wanting to use their time to help others during such a negative time.
COVID-19 has made the majority of the population go into self isolation to protect themselves and to protect others. This then meant many volunteers had the suspend their volunteering duties- this is where micro-volunteering comes into play! Micro-volunteering has allowed volunteers to continue their contributions whilst isolating at home. For example, VolunteerScotland has seen 60,000 people come forward as a response to COVID-19, prepared to help in the most difficult of times- and this is just Scotland!
The future of micro-volunteering…
Micro-volunteering is only going to continue to grow, especially considering the current climate, and this is something we need to encourage. It’s simple, without micro-volunteering there would be less people volunteering their time- especially during COVID-19.
One of the biggest barriers to volunteering is people not having the time. Work commitments is the biggest barrier at (49%), with people ‘doing other things with their spare time’ closely following (35%), and child commitments following at (23%). Micro- volunteering allows people to contribute to volunteering around their schedule. This can even be sharing something on social media to raise awareness.
With COVID-19 now also causing volunteering barriers, micro-volunteering has come to the rescue. Micro-volunteering has allowed volunteers who are self isolating to continue to contribute to a cause from the safety of their home. This could prove to be the future for many volunteers who may not feel safe to return to face-to-face volunteering for a while. This then allows organisations to continue to receive volunteer support, despite the current COVID-19 situation.
How can you encourage micro volunteering with TeamKinetic?
During the peak of the COVID pandemic, we added an entirely new feature set around micro community volunteering. It includes a new admin and provider management page. Your volunteers also have access to their own progressive web app, allowing them to join micro volunteering tasks and record their progress using their phone.
Step 1 – Enable the community tasks feature from your super admin options menu
As you can see above, there are a few options available. Remember to give access to your volunteers and allow them to download the web app in order to access your community tasks.
Step 2 – Add your community tasks
Select ‘Community Tasks’ from the ‘Opportunities & Providers’ menu. Once you have enabled them in the super admin options menu.
Hit the big GREEN plus button to add your first community task.
There are some important things to know when adding your community tasks;
All the data you add in the red section is visible publicly to your volunteers.
The first set of data in the yellow section headed ‘Private Data’ is never revealed to volunteers.
The second set of data in the yellow section headed ‘Data Shown to Assigned Volunteers’ is only revealed to the volunteer that applies and is accepted for the task.
You can describe the task here and provide a location for the recipient. This is as well as restricting which volunteers have access to see and pick up these tasks. You can restrict by their ID check, criminal check status, and whether they are linked to the assigned provider or not.
All your volunteers that have logged into the web app will receive notifications when new tasks are added. This will either be in the app for Android/Chrome devices or via email for iOS devices.
Step 3 – Get your volunteers completing the tasks
By enabling access to volunteers in the super admin options menu, your volunteers can login at ICanHelp.teamkinetic.co.uk. Additionally, by switching on the relevant options, you can also select to advertise the web app to your volunteers when they login on their dashboard.
When they login they will see a familiar mobile app interface and can search and select community tasks and apply to join.
Once they have applied you will see their application in your admin community tasks management page. From there you can assign them to the task. The volunteer will receive a notification that they have been assigned a task and can then view the full details in the app. Once they have completed the task, the volunteer can then update the status within the app.
It’s a super easy and fast way to encourage participation with those small micro-volunteering activities in your community. This will also help to build lasting connections.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch or open a support ticket if you need more help setting up your community tasks. You can chat to us through our website or directly email us at chris@teamkinetic.co.uk.
Our Macmillan fundraising trip to the highest peak in the UK, Ben Nevis, was meant for a balmy May day in 2020. COVID put a stop to that, and after numerous false starts the date turned out to be a potentially chilly and wet late September 2020. As it happened the weather gods were fantastically generous and gave us a crystal clear, dry, and windless day. Our guide reckoned you only got 10-15 days like that a year.
Our group of 23 was split into rule of 6 compatible mini groups.We then hit the trail at a frosty 8am, with our groups starting at staggered times for COVID safety.
The trial is easy to follow and very well maintained. If you are thinking of doing it, don’t be put off by the height, its a moderate gradient all the way up but steady with no scrambling or climbing. We took 3 hours to get to the top at an easy pace for us. If you go in the summer and start early, you’ll have 10 hours of good light to reach the summit and return. If in doubt hire a guide who can make the decisions about weather and timings for you.
The trail starts at the visitor centre, crosses the river, passes an excellent pub and hostel and quickly starts to climb. After 90 minutes or so we got to Lochan Meall, the halfway point!
Lochan Meall – halfway
From the lake there are a series of switchbacks, the guide called them the Christmas Tree, and then a short steep section till you reach the summit plateau. And then the top!
At the top
It was a great feeling to get to the top and we felt so lucky and privileged to have such a clear and glorious day to look out from 1,345 meters across the Nevis Range and the Western Highlands.
We felt lucky and glad to be alive. Don’t take it for granted, cancer hits every family and everyone has their own story. On the way home we learnt that a friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer; young, fit, new family and wife, a tragedy. It was an honour to raise a little over £7,000 for Macmillan who every day helps that family and that friend get the most from the time they have.
This was an amazing experience, and raising money for a charity like Macmillan only made it better.
Every year, charities all over the world are using their resources to help support and provide hope to people in need. Now, today is the day we show our appreciation to all charities out there for the amazing work they do on a day-to-day basis. That’s why today’s blog post is all about saying THANK YOU and showing our appreciation of our charity clients!
First up…
British Blind Sport
British Blind Sport prides itself on making a visible difference through sport as we know that taking the first step into participating in a sporting or recreational activity can change lives for the better
– Alaina MacGregor, Chief Executive Officer
British Blind Sport is an amazing charity that helps the blind and partially sighted people get active and play sports. They encourage adults and children to participate in activities of all levels, from grassroots to the Paralympic Games. They believe that sporting opportunities should be available to everybody. It has been proven that sport can enhance the lives of people with visual impairments by improving their health and increasing their social interaction.
And you can help today in so many different ways. Have a look today to see how you can make a real difference through British Blind Sport by clicking here.
Dreams Come True
Dreams Come True are the only dreams granting charity that fulfils the dreams of children and young adults with such a wide range of medical conditions, locations and ages.
Dreams Come True exist to make the dreams of children and young adults come true; everyone has a dream, but the unfortunate reality is that some have less time to realise their dream. This is why Dreams Come True believe that having one moment where children can forget about the troubles they are currently facing, is a moment that they and their families get to treasure forever.
However, they can’t make any of this happen without support of others. Find out how you can help Dreams Come True today by clicking here!
Groundwork London
Groundwork London have the vision of a city where all communities are vibrant, healthy and safe. Where londoners feel empowered to come together and overcome the challenges they face, wherever they live, and whatever the circumstances or background. However, London continues to face many serious challenges. When these challenges are combined with reductions in public funding and services, it’s usually those who are most disadvantaged that are affected the most. That is why Groundwork designs projects to support these individuals and communities.
Every year they make an incredible impact on people and places in London. Last year they worked with communities across London to create and improve close to 1.9 million square metres of public parks, playgrounds, housing estates, community gardens, nature reserves, roof gardens and many more of London’s valuable public open spaces.
They offer amazing support and advice, which you can find out about now by clicking here.
Into Games
Into-games is a wonderful charity which supports people finding rewarding careers in the games industry. Their projects connect education and industry while providing guidance for learners from primary school upwards. They do this to ensure that a career in the games sector is more accessible to a wider range of young people.
With Into-games, you can find a career, build a game, go to an event, get a mentor, and find opportunities with just a click of a button! Find out for yourself here.
Pankhurst Trust
The Pankhurst Trust was formed in 2014 as a merger between The Pankhurst Trust, which ran The Pankhurst Museum, and Manchester Women’s Aid.
They aim to promote the equality of women, to help women suffering or at risk from domestic abuse, and to secure The Pankhurst Museum for public benefit.
This incredible charity work to ensure the powerful story of the women who won the vote continues to inspire us all to challenge gender inequality, and to ensure that those suffering domestic violence and abuse get the confidential help they need.
The Seashell Trust is a charity dedicated to providing a creative, happy and secure environment for children and young people with complex and severe learning disabilities which include little or no language abilities. they have expert specialist teachers, care staff, onsite therapy team, assistive technologists, swimming teachers and sports coaches. All to allow their students to learn to express themselves, engage with the world, become more independent and live safe, creative and fulfilling lives.
You can start to work or volunteer for The Seashell Trust today by clicking here!
Willowbrook Hospice
Willowbrook Hospice is an independent charity established by local people to build and raise a specialist palliative care unit. Since the hospice opened in 1997, they have cared for over 9000 patients. During this time their services have grown so much that they now receive approximately 1000 patient referrals a year.
The volunteers at Willowbrook Hospice are an essential part of their team. They have event been awarded the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service. You can join their award winning team today by clicking here. Or read about upcoming fundraising events or how you can fundraise yourself by clicking here.
So, we wanted to say…
From everyone at TeamKinetic, we thank you for the amazing work you all do every day of the year. We love working with you and providing you with volunteer management software to make running your organisation and volunteers that bit easier!
On another note, some of you reading this may not be using TeamKinetic, and might want to know what the big deal is?
International Youth Day (IYD) is a time to celebrate young people and their contributions to the world. In 1999, the UN General Assembly marked August 12th as International Youth Day. It serves as an ‘opportunity to celebrate and mainstream young people’s voices, actions and initiatives.’
Each year, the United Nation of Youth create a theme for IYD. This year is: Youth Engagement for Global Action. This theme seeks to highlight how young people are engaging at local, national and global levels enrich themselves, institutions and processes.
Youth Engagement to You
So, Youth Engagement for Global Action… what does this mean to you?
As a young person myself, this statement is important. Allowing young voices and opinions to be heard is crucial to making changes at all levels.
Whilst the world is stuck in a limbo-like situation, local, national and global action is needed to find new ways we can overcome this period. Change is needed now more than ever – having young voices at the forefront allows for fresh input into processes being made. Therefore ultimately paving the way for themselves and future generations.
However, youth engagement to you may mean youth volunteering. This kind of engagement will be important to you and your organisation as it allows for fresh, new input. Giving your youth volunteers the chance to voice their opinions may help improve your future volunteering opportunities.
Education plays a vital part in getting young people to engage. 69% of 10 – 20 year olds get involved with volunteering through their school, college or university. With this, a survey found almost all of youth volunteers reported these opportunities had benefited them in some way.
1.6 million people volunteer abroad yearly, with an astonishing 84% of millennials also saying they would travel abroad to participate in volunteering activities.
With the pandemic clearly showing an increase in youth volunteering, I’m sure you are wondering how you can start to engage this generation and use their ideas to help your organisation.
TeamKinetic is here to help as our research shows our software is extremely effective at recruiting younger volunteers. This could be down to our digital tools that let you share to social media or the fact the younger generation prefer that digital approach.
You can trial our software for FREE to see how TeamKinetic can help you. Just head over to our website to learn more or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for more tips and information about volunteers.
International Youth Day allows us to celebrate all young people and their hard work, whether it be on a local, national or global level. Join us today in saying thank you to all of the young people in our lives!
Can you afford to miss out on the enthusiasm and energy of the youth today? Although, this isn’t a one-way street, many teenagers and younger adults need volunteering experience to help them with future employment to broaden their social networks and develop key life skills. Volunteering in youth boosts academic achievements, health and well-being and teens who participate in an organization that strives to make a difference are more likely to say they will attend higher education.
Despite the many benefits volunteering can clearly have on our young people, organisations still struggle to engage this audience. But hopefully, after reading this you might be able to capture some of that enthusiasm and energy for your organisation!
Be a Known Presence
Visibility for any organisation is always going to be a contributing factor for success, no matter how big or small your organisation is. So, getting on the radar of teens and young adults can help increase your reputation and volunteer numbers. Here are a few ways you can do this…
Attending or hosting events in further and higher education facilities will certainly heighten your visibility and will help get you talking to this youth demographic. Many universities have events and partnerships with 3rd sector and community businesses. For example, some universities will have connections with their city councils to help find students volunteering roles.
Connect with social media managers at colleges and universities, as most universities have a large social following of past and present students, any posts on their socials are sure to get a loud response.
Getting current young volunteers to post their experiences with the organisation to help increase awareness. Using personalised hashtags (#) with your organisation’s name will help increase your popularity amongst the youth.
Be prepared, post your opportunities well in advance. Post on to local volunteering sites, and with colleges and universities. Try to find where your audience’s presence is.
Be sure to state teenagers and young adults are welcome, they tend to like that!
Speak The Language of The Enigma
Don’t worry, we’re not going to be teaching you youth slang, ‘WYD’ and ‘LOL’ are firmly not on today’s agenda. However, social media is a major form of entertainment for young and old with ‘almost 4.57 billion active users globally in April 2020′. That’s ‘9 out of 10 teenagers aged 13-17 [who] use social media platforms’.
Social media is a huge way to keep in contact with this generation, here’s how…
Most young people, including myself, would much prefer to do everything via our phones, book a table, book tickets and sign up for volunteering roles. Giving teens this opportunity will increase your amount of volunteers.
Reaching out on social media is one of the best ways to interact with teens. With Facebook being the highest used platform with 77.3% of 15 – 25-year-olds using it, to Twitter being the least-used platform with 48.6% using it. Create your social media pages on the most popular sites so you can reach out to the youth of today.
Know your audience. Create events and opportunities specifically designed for teens and young adults. Having a role which is attractive to the younger crowd will give you that boost in numbers you need.
Stay Engaging
Getting the youth market to fixate on something is tricky. Most young people tend to lose interest when something becomes well… boring. So engaging is essential and can help retain younger volunteers and recruit new ones. Take a look below at ways you can do this.
Give young people a voice. Allow younger volunteers to be a part of the team when planning. This will help give your organisation a better insight into the mindset of your younger volunteers.
Teens and young adults tend to prefer working more creatively, so motivate them, let them develop new ideas and be supportive of the things they want to try. Always encourage, be open and create an environment where their ideas are respected.
Make events and opportunities fun! It’s simple. You could include music, time to socialise, creative activities and the chance to work with friends. Use your existing youth volunteers and imagination to help make your event or opportunity more fun.
Sell your opportunity or event as interesting and exciting. Gloss it up a little, identify key roles and outline the responsibilities that the volunteers will have and how it may help that volunteer develop that all-important experience they desire.
Pulling Down The Barriers
Finding time to get to know your volunteers can be tricky especially when you have a million and one other things to do. getting to know your younger volunteers might seem a bit tricky, working out how you can relate, but here are some simple ideas you could try.
Get to know your volunteers. You can do this by saving 10 minutes to talk to one or two volunteers. Get to know what they like and don’t like, what interests them, and why they are there.
Communication is key. Be available and be welcoming.
Update and make yourself a known social presence. Create a mailing list of youth volunteers who might want to be emailed, and send out a weekly email or blog sharing stories of success and great efforts.
How TeamKinetic Can Help You!
So, I can only assume you are wondering how on earth you will be able to do all of this and still manage ALL other volunteers. Well, TeamKinetic is here to help. With TeamKinetic you will be able to manage all of your volunteers in one convenient space, giving you more time to focus on promoting to new volunteers.
You can also:
Create and manage opportunities
Send bulk emails to certain groups
Gain unlimited volunteer registration (no cap)
Internal email communications
Volunteer opportunity feedback
DBS checks
Reward and recognise your volunteers
The software gives your volunteers the chance to sign up online to volunteer roles, log their own hours and leave feedback. They can also then post via socials the volunteering they have done which will attract more volunteers.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
Happy World Book Day, not just to the children but to all the volunteers across the UK helping to support our Libraries.
Across the last decade, over 500 libraries have been handed to volunteers. More and more libraries are still becoming staffed only by volunteers, instead of paid staff, provided by the council. This is due to the council making budget cuts. However, this is still better than the alternative of closing down local libraries, inhibiting children of what still is an exciting adventure out the house to somewhere new where their imagination can run wild!
Libraries create opportunities for children to:
Learn
Develop and grow
Interact with other children
Get help with homework
Give mum and dad a break
And generally, have fun through the power of imagination!
Libraries are being revived
Despite some towns being deprived of their local library services. Many libraries still continue to run each day through the commitment of local community volunteer groups. Where members of the groups will rotate working shifts allowing the library duties to be split equally amongst the volunteers. Many community-run libraries have been revived by volunteers. This is because the previously paid staff before weren’t local, therefore naturally they didn’t have the incentive to be as engaged with the community as current local volunteers are now.
Volunteers helping communities
Community volunteers are performing amazing tasks in order to keep libraries fresh and welcoming to all local communities. Our current client MCRVIP in Manchester have been advertising volunteering opportunities for libraries across the whole of Manchester, opportunities at Manchester libraries can include:
Lego Club volunteers
Once a month Film and craft volunteers
General Community library volunteers
IT volunteers
Homework club volunteers
Saturday club volunteers
More roles than you would have realised, it shows that it’s not all stacking and scanning books, but actually helping the community and interacting with the children and adults that go.
So thank you to all the volunteers for helping our community libraries.
Many children dream wildly about becoming a firefighter when they’re older, many children would consider this to be their ultimate dream job. It certainly was mine for many years. Sadly, of the many that dream, few actually become firefighters later in life.
However, those who continued to dream heroic fantasies have been continuing them by helping to fight the detrimental fires that have been taking place in Australia.
Becoming a volunteer firefighter in the UK is not well-renowned. But in America and Australia volunteer training is highly extensive, requiring hard work and valiant commitment to the community. Smaller towns and villages in such places rely on volunteer firefighters to respond quickly to incidents, perform firefighting duties, and provide assistance and support to full-time paid firefighters.
Ultimately, ‘volunteering’ means there are no monetary benefits for volunteer firefighters risking their lives. However, many volunteer firefighters are honoured and proud to be able to serve and protect their local communities – which is the greatest reward of all.
Australia
Volunteer Firefighters
The Australian wildfires are expected each year during the summer, marking it the fire season. Hot and dry conditions permit perfect conditions for a blaze to start. This season is always particularly dangerous proving more so than ever this Australian summer, the worst seen in decades. The last significant wildfires were Black Saturday 2009.
Wildfires have swept across 17.9 million acres of woodland and national parks, also effecting the largest cities Melbourne and Sydney – with the state of New South Wales being the worst struck. A total of 27 people have died and over 480 million animals.
The video above is merely human kindness towards a fellow friendly koala. Many people, like those above, have taken their own actions to help desperate wildlife.
The bushfires are continuing to blaze and challenge the brave and noble volunteer firefighters which are risking their lives to save their country. Many firefighters have been injured and lost homes and their own lives.
The New South Wales Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) is the largest in the world, with 70,000 members across 2,002 brigades. The NSW RFS has received a spike (five times their usual amount) in applications of people wanting to become volunteer firefighters due to the ongoing events.
The Australian Prime Minister recently announced that volunteer firefighters will receive up to 6,000 Australian dollars if called out to battle blazes for more than 10 days. The Prime Minister said the compensation was necessary so that the NSW fires commissioner was able to continue to call out the volunteer force from their usual jobs – as the bushfires continue.
TeamKinetic volunteer management software
Our thoughts are with those in Australia and those being directly impacted by the fires. Please support The NSW RFS here. These horrific events should not be ignored.
partially sighted people get active and play sports. They encourage adults and children to participate in activities of all levels, from grassroots to the Paralympic Games. They believe that sporting opportunities should be available to everybody. It has been proven that sport can enhance the lives of people with visual impairments by improving their health and increasing their social interaction.
Education plays a vital part in getting young people to engage. 
