Covid showed us all how important volunteering is for our city. Thousands of people stepped forward to support their neighbours, and people they’d never met, helping to make sure that people were safe. Now organisations across Leeds are coming together to come up with a plan to make volunteering easier, more connected, a better experience for volunteers and able to make a greater difference.

Last week, over 30 people came together from across the third and public sector through Leeds Volunteer Managers Network to start the process of developing a city Volunteer Strategy. Building on the work of national partners to develop a Vision for Volunteering we put our heads together to start working out the big challenges and bigger solutions for how to make Volunteering better.

As a reminder of why volunteering matters, the session heard from Mo who’d begun volunteering in prison through the Giving Time project. After continuing his volunteering journey on release, he’s recently been employed in a support worker role.

Mo says, ‘everything that’s happened for me, happened when I met the Giving Time team and decided to volunteer’.

 Mo’s experience was reflected in the value that most participants say they want to see – Volunteering that enables people to grow.

Enabling people to grow and doing together in a way that includes gave us a starting point to identify the key challenges:

• Ensuring our whole city values, respects and celebrates volunteers and volunteering
• Having the resources (for both volunteers and organisations) to the best job
• Developing new skills and sharing the practice that make volunteering easier
• Understanding changes in who volunteers, why they want to volunteer and how they want to volunteer

The session came up with some fantastic ideas that will help to address these challenges:

• Build on our networks so we can share practice for instance by understanding blockages ad barriers to getting DBS checks
• Explore ways for organisations to partner so that volunteers can easily move roles that suit them better
• Develop new ways to wrap support around people that aren’t yet ready to volunteer
• Make sure that employers understand and give credit to the skills that people develop when they volunteer.

The session gave me so much food for thought….and that’s the best thing. It was simply brilliant to be in a room (for the first time in 4 years) with a group of people that really care about how volunteers do incredible things every day and I can’t wait for the next instalment of the conversation.

Voluntary Action Leeds