Support for volunteering

[Via the Ourcommunity (www.ourcommunity.com.au) newsletter]

Everybody’s always been in favour of volunteering, but now some governments are actually starting to do something to help support it.

The UK Workforce hub has issued a set of National Occupational Standards 2008 for Management of Volunteers to put together all the things that a volunteer coordinator – paid or unpaid – might have to do.

These National Occupational Standards define the whole spectrum of activities involved in the management of volunteers and will help you to carry out this role effectively, with emphasis on
A. Developing and evaluating strategies & policies that support volunteering
B. Promoting volunteering
C. Recruiting, placing, & inducting volunteers
D. Managing & developing volunteers
E. Managing yourself, your relationships & your responsibilities
F. Providing management support for volunteering programs

Each section goes into more detail – the section on Management Support, for example, includes information on promoting your organisation and its services, managing projects involving volunteers, obtaining funds to support volunteering, and more.

Each of these points is broken down further, too, and running an eye down them as a checklist would be a useful exercise for anybody who’s been given the job.

One of the things that’s too new to make the standards under Recruiting also comes from England, where they’re giving universities the option of allowing their students degree credits for their voluntary work – for “experiential learning” they’ve done in the workplace or while volunteering.
Although credit systems are already in operation in most UK universities, up to now there’s been no single system operating across the whole of the country.
So not only are we behind the UK in the medal tally, their universities have also got a much better grasp of the value of volunteering than ours have.

And why are the British doing this? Because, as they say,

The emerging agenda for higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK) promotes lifelong learning, social inclusion, wider participation, employability and partnership working with business, community organisations and among HE providers nationally and internationally. Consequently, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly recognising the significant knowledge, skills and understanding which can
be developed as a result of learning opportunities found at work, both paid and unpaid, and through individual activities and interests.

Seems sensible.

Over in America, meanwhile, they’re conducting the kind of fine‐grained research into volunteering that we need if we are to hold our own.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, has done surveys to find that
• Volunteers, on average, are about as busy as other people.
• Volunteers don’t make time for volunteering by simply trading paid work for unpaid work.
• Volunteers trade off more than an hour a day of TV watching, on average, to engage in voluntary service. On average, recent volunteers watch approximately 15 hours of television per week, compared to approximately 21 hours for former volunteers and 23 hours for non‐volunteers.
• Volunteers spend substantially more time caring for children than either former volunteers or nonvolunteers do.
• In a typical day, volunteers tend to be more socially connected and interact more with others. For instance, recent volunteers spend 78% of their mealtime hours eating with other people, compared to about 70% for
non‐volunteers.
• Good health is preserved by volunteering; it keeps healthy volunteers healthy.

What’s not to like?

Back here in Oz, though, the Australian Bureau of Statistics funding has been cut, and its coverage of the Australian voluntary sector is cursory at best. Do the American findings also apply here? We can only guess.

Out of Pocket – Out of Luck

Meanwhile, Volunteering Australia has released the finding of the 2008 National Survey of Volunteering Issues. The survey attempts to work out where volunteers are satisfied, where they’re concerned, and what moves them. It’s found, for example, that 98% of volunteers said that they believed their work as volunteers made a difference to their organisation and its work, and 86% of volunteers believed their volunteering increased their sense of community belonging – figures that help the sector’s quest for government recognition of its effect on community health and social cohesion.

The survey looked at Corporate Volunteering for the first time – 38% of surveyed organisations with volunteers had corporate or employee programs, and 57% of those respondents reported that corporate volunteers made an extremely valuable contribution to their organisation.

On the downside, it seems that Australian community groups are being forced to take a harder line on repaying out-of-pocket expenses.
On the other hand, when asked, “Do out of pocket expenses affect your ability or desire to volunteer?” the proportion who said “No, they don’t,” went up from 36% to 60%, so the net effect probably wasn’t large.

Does your organisation offer to reimburse any out of pocket expenses?2007(n = 117)
2008(n = 194)
Yes – in full 27% 28%
Yes – in part 52% 38%
No – we can’t afford it 18% 22%
No – it’s against our policy 1% 7%
No – we haven’t thought about it 1% 4%
Don’t know 1% 3%