About GoldStar 
Developing clear pathways
Different stages through which a volunteer may progress should be identified and set out. The identification of clear pathways should be seen as a strategic objective of the organisation, and measures put in place to ensure that they happen in practice.
Below are a few examples of how other organisations have accoplished this: |
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Cheetham Hill Advice Centre actively encourages further training and/or employment. |
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Communities United Project provides clear pathways for both young people and adults to gain a range of experiences and opportunities. |
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Home Start actively encourages volunteers to progress into further training and/or employment. |
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Gateshead Access Panel builds progression routes into their volunteer placements. |
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Latin American Women’s Rights Service create pathways to employment by breaking down the barriers that prevent Latin American women from entering paid work. |
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Cheetham Hill
Many volunteers at Cheetham Hill do not stay with the project for more than a year, this is because CHAC encourage their volunteers to move on to further study, volunteer or paid work in advice or other related felids. The project so far has been able to provide the advice sector in Manchester with experienced advisers, who have taken on paid positions as advice workers in the Manchester City Council’s Manchester Advice, SureStart, Refugee Action Manchester and Manchester Refugee Support Network. Within Manchester City Council’s Advice Service CHAC are recognised as one of the main providers of new advisers to the sector, particularly from BAME communities and speakers of other community languages.
CHAC do not see retention for its own sake a necessary indicator of success, volunteers should move on, in order to continue the process of their personal development. CHAC seek to share this lesson with other organisations: that the reason a volunteer leaves is more important than the fact they have left in assessing the effectiveness of a project. This approach also provides volunteering opportunities for new people who would not be able to access the project if volunteers never moved.
Once volunteers have completed the 10-day advice workers training with CHAC various progression training is also available depending upon particular volunteering positions, including in relation to generalist advice work, welfare benefits advice, housing advice, debt service and immigration and asylum/refugee advice.
The Volunteer Development Project has always had much wider aims than merely training people for advice jobs, but an increasing trend of the Project has been to attract people interested in securing paid work in advice or related fields as a consequence of their volunteering. This is welcomed by the Project, but they are also careful that in selecting volunteers a mix of people volunteering for different reasons is ensured, including some who wish to help others and give something back to the community without looking for a career at the end of it.
Communities United Project
CUP provides clear pathways for both young people and adults to gain a range of experiences and opportunities through participation in the various CUP programmes and projects.
Communities United Project recognises that local residents have lots of untapped skills and knowledge, which can be used to develop better communities, providing constructive leisure time for disadvantaged young people.
The majority of volunteers are non-traditional learners, so they don’t have many, or often, no formal qualifications. CUP offers training & support to volunteers to enable them to achieve & aspire to things maybe they once thought were out of their reach. Many adult volunteers will have had poor experiences through mainstream education, which are often reflected in levels of qualification attainment. CUP serves to reintroduce adult volunteers to learning.
Working with the wider community, local adult volunteers are supported in the development of new community led initiatives targeting, in particular, young people within areas experiencing high levels of crime and anti-social behaviour. CUP provides a critical enabling role, supporting adults in a non threatening environment, whilst they acquire or re-learn the skills necessary to enable them to develop and run activities for young people in their communities. CUP provides training such as Football Association Coaching Awards, Working with Children, mentoring Young People, First Aid, Meeting and Communication Skills and Community Sports Leader Award. The project does not duplicate the coaching activities of mainstream junior football leagues but focuses instead on breaking down the barriers to personal and social development and building bridges within and between communities. The ownership and long term management of each initiative lies with the host community, which is supported by CUP.
A CUP volunteer can be anyone over the age of 16. This diverse range of ages, as well as circumstances, which exists amongst volunteers, is accommodated through CUP’s commitment to provide individual approaches to training and development. This includes significant lead in time and confidence building before referring volunteers to more formal training processes.
Leeds HomeStart
Home Start actively encourages volunteers to progress into further training and/or employment. Considerable support is provided to volunteers by Home-Start at the recruitment stage. A structured link has been developed with Leeds Metropolitan University that enables those that want to use the 10-week induction process and associated NVQ accreditation as a stepping stone to a degree in Social Work at Leeds Metropolitan University. 8 volunteers have successfully completed this route. Home-Start Leeds also encourages progression on to further training through other routes, as illustrated by the case study below.
Mary is a 39-year-old mother with twin children. She became a volunteer about four years and through volunteering with Home-Start Leeds has progressed to university undertaking a social work degree.
After undertaking extensive training through Home-Start Leeds and completion of a two-year access to social work course through Thomas Danby College, she is now coming up to finishing her first year as a Social Work student at Bradford University.
Mary identified her motivation for undertaking the course as “helping people. I thought if I could just help somebody on a voluntary basis, just on a couple of hours a week, what could I do if I was to do that full time”
She identifies her volunteering experiences with Home-Start Leeds as critical to progression on to her current course. She commented: “Without being a Home-Start volunteer I would never have had the courage to do this” “The confidence that I have gained in the last four years is tremendous”
Before Mary started volunteering she had no qualifications. She attributes getting on to her access social work access course at least in part to experience of volunteering at Home-Start, commenting:
“Getting on that I think it helped that I had the experience through Home-Start”.
Some practical experience with Home-Start in relation to issues such as child protection is also identified by Mary as of help in terms of her current course. One of the most important aspects of these experiences has been an increase in her confidence. She indicted that previously “I really lacked in confidence”. Her future aspirations are to become a qualified social worker in two years time and hopefully still have the volunteering role at Home-Start Leeds.
Gateshead Access Panel
Gateshead Access Panel builds progression routes into their volunteer placements because they recognise that some of their volunteers face severe barriers to work/career progression.
The Project ensures each volunteer has an individual progression route built into their placement, measuring not only new skills, but also personal development. The individual’s progression route is written up and kept on file. This provides a useful measurement tool for both the volunteer and the organisation to chart progress but also provides a record of training and achievements for the volunteer to use on a CV when applying for courses or employment.
The organisation ensures that volunteers are offered regular support and supervision sessions and that their development needs and information requests are made using the Volunteers Review Form. The review assessment process has been used by Volunteer England as a best practice example.
Latin American Womens Right Service
The Latin American Women's Rights Service’s (LAWRS) volunteering project was created in recognition of the difficulties that Latin American women face in entering the labour market in the UK. The project targets refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, offering unpaid (voluntary), work experience in advice and guidance, interpreting, outreach and other areas identified by volunteers to match their skills.
A key focus of activity undertaken by LAWRS is in the creation of realistic pathways to employment and breaking down the barriers that prevent LA women from improving their employment opportunities. The volunteering project gives LA women opportunities to become familiar with the world of work (other than cleaning/services) and gain work experience in a supportive environment. Particular features of this area of good practice include:
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One-to-one support and supervision
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Building life confidence and self-esteem
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Promotion of active citizenship and mutual networks of support
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Job finding support
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Vacancies e-bulletin for volunteers
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Workshops
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Help with compiling a CV
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English language tuition
Well-structured work experience opportunities (work shadowing, work-plans and set objectives) To date, 56% of former volunteers have moved on to bigger and better opportunities, evidencing that this approach is effective in bringing about improved life chances.
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