GoldStar - Snapshot Age Concern - Promoting good practice in managing volunteers from socially excluded groups

Home

GoldStar - Promoting good practice in managing volunteers from socially excluded groups

GoldStar Projects

Good Practice Toolkit

Ambassador Bank

Volunteer Case Studies

Other Useful Information

Snapshots


Project	Description
Haltwhistle Partnership	Making volunteering accessible to all members of the community by breaking down barriers

Volunteering Tynedale is the working name of Tynedale Voluntary Action, which is a local volunteer centre and member of Volunteering England. Their mission is to promote, enable and develop volunteering throughout Tynedale, seeking to break down barriers and make volunteering accessible to all sections of the community. They have six core functions: marketing volunteering; developing volunteering opportunities; brokerage; good practice development; policy response and campaigning, research and lobbying and strategic development of volunteering.

The Haltwhistle Rural Project built on the success of the original Time Limited Development Fund project through its extension into the various outlying scattered rural settlements and villages in the west, north and south of Tynedale. The project aims to focus on engaging the local population as volunteers in community activities, which will enable those communities to grow and thrive.

The project has a particular focus on community engagement and a needs driven approach to projects. The nature of the project means community engagement can be difficult. This is addressed by having a local person working at grass-roots level as opposed to having simply a ‘hot desk’ presence. The Project Officer promotes and develops volunteering in Haltwhistle’s outlying rural communities. This grass roots Project Officer, with local knowledge and utilising local contacts/networks is a key factor in ensuring that volunteers continue in their chosen activity and, where appropriate, get involved in other opportunities. In addition, the volunteering opportunities themselves are needs driven, in direct response to the express wishes of the local community. Some of these activities have reflected the needs of the local faith communities, as the local churches are very active, especially in smaller communities. In these examples the motivation for volunteering has come from the individuals themselves.

The first achievement of the project was the production, publication and district-wide distribution of the 3rd edition of Volunteering Tynedales’s Guide, the “Guide to Volunteering in Tyneside”, which contains detailed information on voluntary organisations offering volunteering opportunities across the district, provides relevant contact details and gives specific information about volunteering in general. Almost 8,000 copies were printed of which nearly 7,000 were delivered to every household in the west of the district.

The opportunities offered have been relevant to the local community and have often involved innovative project work. One example is the Sacred Yew Project, a collaborative project between Volunteering Tynedale and a local community. It was initiated by local people, led and run by volunteers, and involved the local school, the parish, a visually impaired craft group, and sighted volunteers. It is a written and recorded project based on their perceptions and feelings for the Ancient Yew Tree that stands in Beltingham Churchyard and the sacred space around it. The project fills a gap in the provision of locally based projects which focus on local history, creativity and heritage in a very rural area.

Volunteering Tynedale is committed to both internal project evaluation and external evaluation. Internal evaluation incorporates both outputs and outcomes as a key part of its on going monitoring and assessment. A formal Evaluation Report was produced, which incorporated an external evaluation of the initial Time Limited Development Fund funded Haltwhistle project.

Back to Snaphots