News

With 2005 being promoted as the Year of the Volunteer by the Home Office, CSV and Volunteering England, it's to be hoped that those who give their time for free will enjoy a positive experience over the next 12 months.

Charities have always used volunteers. But it is now acknowledged by organisations experienced in volunteer management that they need to be supported throughout their placement, particularly when working with vulnerable and challenging clients.

However, the best-practice scenario of induction, training and ongoing supervision does not always happen. And when it doesn't, the consequences can be serious. For a volunteer, the situation may become distressing or even dangerous. In June 2000, an inquiry into the killing of untrained volunteer care worker Jonathan Newby in 1993 found there was "a total failure to provide a supportive environment" for him. Newby was the only worker on duty at the Oxford Cyrenian hostel when he was stabbed by a resident with severe mental illness.


This is an extreme example of what can go wrong if volunteers are left untrained and unsupported, but many volunteers can recount bad experiences. Maggie Miller* is now a qualified youth worker, but her 18 months as a full-time volunteer in her early 20s could have put someone less robust off a caring profession for life. In several placements at supported housing projects, she and other unqualified volunteers were left alone in charge of young people with multiple needs. It was, she says, progressively exhausting and sometimes frightening.

"In one place in Northamptonshire, me and a colleague, also a volunteer, were left to work there all day and all night. Office staff would meet up with us once a day, but we were working with young people who were very troubled, self-harming, and there were sometimes suicide attempts," she recalls. "I remember after one of these episodes asking casualty not to discharge a young person back into my care.

"We all talked about it after it happened, and the feeling was that it wasn't OK. We were put at risk, but more importantly, the young people were being put at risk."

In some of her placements she knew young volunteers had entered into sexual relationships with residents, and points out that when volunteers have left home for the first time they are often needy themselves. Without training and support, not every volunteer will understand about boundaries in a setting where a major part of their role is to befriend clients.

It's a tension acknowledged by Richard Katona, volunteering development manager at Depaul Trust, which places volunteers as mentors to young people and prisoners due for release.

"You're getting someone to undertake a role which may be nothing that their previous life has prepared them for. Things that are taken for granted by people in the sector, like professional boundaries, may seem hard or even unfair to a volunteer," he says.

Because discipline is an idea that charities fight shy of when it comes to volunteers - who are after all there out of their own goodwill - it is even more important for managers to have carefully thought through the risk factors of their particular project before recruiting, says Katona. Then when it comes to induction and ongoing support, training can be tailored to the needs of the project and the abilities of the volunteer.

As with many of the bigger charities, Depaul Trust has an induction process and an established method of placement supervision. But smaller charities may not have the resources to put these tools in place.

So it is potentially exciting that two initiatives to help charities to manage volunteers have recently been launched.
Investing in Volunteers is a new award assessed by Volunteering England.(1) But according to Barbara Regnier, its director of consultancy and education, just 16 organisations have signed up so far. The aim is to have 30 charities onboard by March.

Out of the thousands of voluntary organisations using volunteers throughout the country, 30 does not seem a lot. Volunteering England only has a certain capacity to audit in terms of the numbers of experts it can draw on, added to which, Regnier admits that the fee - a minimum of £1,000 plus VAT for organisations with turnover of less than £1m - is likely to discourage smaller charities from applying.


And Volunteering England is not targeting the bigger charities. All of which leaves one wondering how effective the Investing in Volunteers award is likely to be.

Another approach to encouraging good practice comes from the new National Occupational Standards for Managing Volunteers. Developed by the Voluntary Sector National Training Organisation (VSNTO) and launched in April, the standards comprehensively address the support and development of volunteers.(2)

The problem, says Angeline Hamilton at the VSNTO, is that the standards come in a dauntingly big book, and nobody is using them yet. "A lot of people have downloaded them and bought them, but if they're not using them, then what's the point?"

However, a series of workshops has been developed to make the standards more accessible, and it is hoped that as more volunteer managers attend, they will dust down their copies when back in the office.

Miller's sense of why things went so badly wrong at times during her placements is that the charities she applied to were on tight budgets and used volunteers so they could stretch their funding further.

At NCH, which works with 2,500 volunteers nationally, deputy director of children's services Moira Luccock is clear that though managing volunteers is expensive in terms of staff time, there is no other option. "It's not cost-neutral, but there is no point taking someone on without it, because you leave the volunteer vulnerable and the child vulnerable," she points out.

Certain types of volunteering, such as the independent visitor scheme, will by their nature involve some risk. Although the volunteer's relationship with a young person begins in a supervised setting, eventually they will spend time alone, and then, says Luccock, it is the prior thought given by volunteer managers to assess the risk at every contact, together with follow-up debriefs, that work to keep a situation safe.

"Issues of sexuality can come up. There was a young woman I had linked with a 14-year-old boy with learning difficulties, and we had to manage it carefully because you have young people with testosterone flying and an attractive young woman. The volunteer has to be safe. The responsibility is on us to ensure that the risk is minimised."

Although Miller emphasises that she had some of her most rewarding life experiences while on her placements, and would not want potential volunteers to be put off, her knowledge and experience as a qualified youth worker means she still has concerns that volunteers - and their clients - occasionally face difficult situations.

"I believe you should never leave an untrained volunteer alone overnight in a supported housing project with young people with multiple needs. We needed training; we weren't even sure what was good and what was bad practice," she says. "I think in some of the smaller charities this kind of thing may still be happening, because I ask myself: what would have made it change since I stopped?" CC

* Name has been changed.

(1) Investing in Volunteers - information from www.volunteeringengland.org.uk
(2) Download the National Occupational Standards for Managing Volunteers from www.voluntarysectorskills.org.uk