We involve volunteers because they are motivated, have fun helping and tell us it lets them give something back to the community. Volunteers are crucial to Brae.

Mary Sneddon, Centre Manager,
Brae RDA Partnership (Riding for the Disabled).

Volunteer Friendly

Volunteer Friendly involves working through a checklist of best practice, organised into five strands. This produces an action plan to help you to develop a portfolio of evidence showing the quality of your work with volunteers. To assist your progress through the Award an accompanying online toolkit www.volunteerfriendly.org.uk provides guidance, examples and templates (GET).

The Process

There are five strands to Volunteer Friendly:

Commitment to Involving Volunteers
(Understanding why your group uses volunteers)
Making Volunteering Happen
(Money, management, staff time and materials)
Fair & Equal Volunteering
(Volunteer diversity, equal opportunities, fair recruitment, references and checks)
Volunteering Tasks & Getting Them Done
(Developing task descriptions, training and the support needs of individuals)
Celebrating Volunteers’ Contributions

There are three tasks in each strand. There are suggestions as to where you might find the evidence to show that you have completed each task. Each strand also has Guidance, Examples and Templates (GET) you can use if you identify any gaps in your evidence.

Check what your group has in place and score using the following scale:

Getting Started Red

Moving Forward Amber

Completed Score Green

The results will help you to build your action plan.

EXAMPLE

Tasks

For access to further information on the strands, please contact us.

In their own words

"We are very pleased to have attained formal recognition that we have good working practices and management systems in place to support our volunteers."