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

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Project	Description
North Tyneside Voluntary Organisations Development Agency	Helping to recruit youth volunteers from those facing barriers

North Tyneside Voluntary Organisations Development Agency (VODA) provides recruitment, placement, training and support for volunteers and placement providers. VODA works locally, sub-regionally and regionally to promote the value of the voluntary and community sector.

The Active Youth Project aims to recruit young people from a broad range of backgrounds to volunteer in group activities. It particularly targets young people who need additional support and would not normally consider volunteering, such as people facing barriers relating to disabilities, offending, homelessness, mental health and challenging behaviour.

The Active Youth Project worker carries out regular outreach sessions at local youth centres, schools and pupil referral units. These targeted recruitment sessions are run with young people who are facing barriers to volunteering. Specific organisations working with young people at risk of social exclusion are targeted, for example Barnardos - The Base, Working Links and e2e programmes.

Volunteer challenges are organised to involve specific groups of young people, who face additional barriers. For example, challenges specifically designed for wheelchair users, taking into account issues such as accessibility. Fourteen such challenges have been organised, varying from gardening and environmental projects to international exchanges and running a radio station.

Active Youth offers opportunities for young people to plan and execute their own group projects. This allows young people to take an active role in shaping their volunteering opportunity. A series of consultations in 2005 revealed that the young people wanted to have a more active role in designing their volunteer activities and Active Youth responded by supporting young people to carry out youth-led work as much as possible, giving the young people the experience of planning, organising, running and evaluating their own projects, raising funds, and making decisions. In 2006 a group of young people planned and ran their own youth radio station. Other youth led projects have included the 'I don't believe it' drama group developed by a group of people with disabilities and a toddler group developed by two young mums.

Active Youth also encourages the young people to risk assess their own volunteering. Each group works with the project worker to identify and minimise risks before beginning their challenge. Volunteers receive all information relating to a challenge before it starts and go through induction and training as appropriate to the tasks.

Further involvement of the volunteers is evidenced in the records and forms used by the project. All volunteers complete an Active Youth form. The forms were designed in consultation with young people to ensure their accessibility. Their details are then input onto a database that allows statistical data to be generated.

A number of innovative methods are utilised to assess the impact of volunteering, such as questionnaires, web based polls, games and film. This includes filming of Volunteer Challenges.

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