Four Functions of Local Infrastructure
Function Four
Volunteering
Our Vision for Volunteering
Our vision for volunteering is to create a community where everyone comes together to make a positive impact. We believe that together we can create meaningful connections, foster empathy, and create a real sense of unity.
Putting the ‘unity’ in community, our mission is to inspire others to join in and help make the world a better place for all.
Together, we can make a difference, one act of kindness at a time.
What We Do
Volunteering is a core part of the voluntary sector, helping organisations like yours to reach people in our local communities. It’s our job to encourage and nurture volunteering opportunities to help build connections and work together for the causes close to their hearts. By working together, our sector can drive real positive change in local communities and reach more and more people in need.
At VAST, we’re passionate about volunteering and our dedicated volunteering team is equally as passionate about your volunteering too. We use that passion to help your organisation!
Our work helps you to enhance and perfect yours. Whether that’s support with your policies and procedures around volunteering, creating easily accessible and inclusive volunteering roles, or simply sharing best practice, we will do what it takes to champion volunteers, their vital work, and the enormous impact they have on communities.
How We Do It
We use a personalised approach to our volunteering matching service. When it comes to finding the right role for a volunteer, or the right volunteer for the role, we take it one step at a time.
Volunteering isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ thing, it all depends on the person, the organisation and their service users, the role, and more… the list goes on.
So, over the years we’ve learned that everyone needs different levels or types of support and used that to develop and improve our trusted, tried, and tested volunteer matching service.
It’s part of a Local Infrastructure Organisation’s (LIO’s) responsibility to find the best ways of working with you and understanding the needs of your organisation and your volunteers.
Start to finish volunteer support
One of the most important things for us as an LIO is to support you and your volunteers. Through our volunteering offer, we aim to give as much information and guidance as possible to make volunteering experiences the best they can be. For everyone involved.
Many LIO’s create or run volunteer centres, and while our support isn’t necessarily a ‘volunteer centre’ in name, it is a whole team dedicated to all things volunteering in Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire.
This is why we provide VCSE organisations like yours with a full training package. Most of our training is free for our members and includes sessions especially for people that manage or coordinate volunteers in any way.
Another part of our role is to ensure that the volunteers we place with you are happy, settled, and supported every step of the way. We want to help you develop and maintain a positive and supportive environment for volunteers and make sure that their volunteering experience is a positive one.
Practice makes progress
Well, almost… We don’t pretend our offer is perfect, it’s not. But it is the best it can be thanks to people like you and organisations like yours. Promoting and supporting best practices around volunteering is a big part of our role as an LIO, and we’ve used years of experience and feedback from others in the sector to inform and shape our services.
This has ultimately led to:
Crossing the sectors
It’s important for us to make sure that others know the “value of volunteering”, the huge contribution volunteers make, and the crucial role they play in improving lives. That means local councils, government officials, health and social care authorities, government officials, and businesses in the private sector. And the private sector’s a good one as they can help VCSE organisations in ways you might not expect.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Employer-Supported Volunteering (ESV) is when private businesses ‘give something back’. This is often in the form of hands-on help with projects like redecorating a community venue or redeveloping a community garden (and paying for it too!). This cross-sector working can also be the start of a beautiful friendship – and it’s great when that happens!
Other volunteering activities
We’ve created an inclusive volunteering guide on how to make volunteering opportunities as accessible as possible. We’ve also carried out some consultation work around inclusive volunteering, you can read the report about that work here.
Our working with young volunteers guide explains how to work with young volunteers safely and effectively.
This is a list of handy hints and tips on things both volunteers and organisations can do to make volunteering more accessible for everyone.
This roadmap we created shows how our volunteer matching service works for volunteers looking to find a role that’s right for them. There’s also one explaining how it works for organisations too.
In this infographic, we share the mental health benefits of volunteering.
We host several volunteer fayres every year to bring organisations closer to potential volunteers. We also regularly attend local events to raise awareness of volunteering and how it helps local people. Get in touch to find out more about our volunteer fayres.
Our CSR brokerage service brings local businesses and companies together with voluntary sector groups to help support local community projects through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) opportunities.
This is a popular peer-support network where volunteer managers and coordinators come together to share their hints, tips, knowledge, skills, and experiences to help and support each other in their roles.
We provide group and one-to-one sessions as well as bespoke comprehensive training and support for trustees and boards to ensure they are aware of their legal responsibilities, how they can contribute to driving change and running efficient and effective voluntary organisations.
The Volunteer Quality Standards scheme provides a framework which organisations can work towards accreditation based on their volunteering policies and procedures, and the way they work with new and existing volunteers.
“Volunteering, both formal and informal, is at the heart of thriving communities.”