This week (June 1-7) is Volunteers Week and provides the perfect opportunity to take time to thank all the wonderful volunteers who give their time to help others.
Community Links provides volunteers with the opportunity to make a meaningful difference for others while gaining practical experience, skills and insights for themselves. This is why hundreds of volunteers get involved in all areas of our work. As a multipurpose organization we have all sorts of volunteering opportunities including activities with children and young people, filling in complex forms with clients of our Welfare Rights Advice team , providing research for our policy and campaigning work and all sorts of tasks alongside Senior Management as well as our Trustee board.
We have individual volunteers coming to work on a specific session, longer term interns working on a particular project and volunteer groups from our corporate supporters. Our friends in the city – our corporate volunteers – may come to us and undertake a volunteering challenge or run a team building workshop or they may engage disadvantaged young people at Community Links and give them the opportunity to visit company offices for extensive workshops on CV, interview and presentation skills, helping to break down barriers and raise aspirations amongst the young people to achieve their full potential.
Whichever way we work together volunteers make an enormous difference to the work we do, over the last three years we have benefited from almost 82,000 hours of volunteer time – that equates to about nine years and four months of one person’s time, 24 hours a day. But the true value is not measured simply in the hours spent – it is often the one-to-one human contact between someone with the time to spend taking an interest in a person who needs a little support. Sometimes setting up and running a pensioners tea-dance, taking a group of children to the zoo for the first time, mentoring a young person struggling with school – or just having fun together can bring significant brightness to another person’s life.
We believe that everyone has the potential to do great things and that sometimes all people need is a little bit of help to feel empowered to take the next step. We have many members of staff working with us who first began as volunteers and we’d like to think about how we can progress and develop volunteers over time by referring them to different Community Links projects to gain relevant experience, helping them to gain access to appropriate training and accreditation to gain relevant qualifications and ultimately enable them to secure employment as a result of their valuable volunteer experience.
We are grateful to all the volunteers who support our work and the work of other community groups and voluntary sector agencies. It is heartening to think of so many “willing citizens” volunteering to help others “not because they are forced from without but because they are compelled from within” as we said in our report on the many forms of community involvement Willing Citizens and the Making of the Good Society.
If you want to get involved with out work as a volunteer have a look at our website and please get in touch you will be made very welcome.
Amid the din of election coverage, it’s nice to be reminded that most of the world is carrying on as normal – working, volunteering, even dancing. Today, for example, is Community Links’ annual pensioners’ tea dance and karaoke party, organised by a group of volunteers from one of our corporate supporters. The hubbub emanating from the hall, right in the middle of our office, is a nice if distracting reminder that the good society is being supported every day, and no doubt will continue whoever makes it in to government.
linksUK are recruiting for a volunteer ‘research’ intern.
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