Working With Volunteers

Volunteers are vital to the success of any community organisation.

In most community groups the governance tasks are carried out by a volunteer committee or board of management.

Volunteers sometimes contribute their professional skills to assist with the management tasks of the group.

And volunteers make up the vast majority of many community groups’ workforces – pitching in to get the operational tasks of the group done, i.e. staffing visitor centres, running little aths events, planting trees, selling raffle tickets…the list goes on.

So it makes good sense that we look after our volunteers in the same way as we would any paid staff.

In the last article we talked about working with staff, and the same principles apply to working with volunteers.

We want to ‘recruit’ our volunteers well so we get people who are a good fit to the tasks we need them to do.  We need to support our volunteers with good orientation/induction/training so they know what they have to do and can do it safely.  And we need to manage our volunteers so any issues are dealt with quickly and appropriately.

At the time of writing, in Victoria volunteers are not covered by health and safety legislation but we still have a duty of care to them, so we need to make sure we do everything reasonably possible to keep them safe.

Worksafe Victoria has some great resources on its website that relate to volunteers, and I would recommend downloading a copy of ‘Volunteer Health and Safety: a handbook for community service organisations’ and tabling it with your committee for their attention.

And don’t forget to have insurance that covers your volunteers in the unfortunate event that they are injured.

You can download this Blog Post as a tip sheet by clicking here:Tip Sheet_ Working With Volunteers Apr 4,2015