1. Why do we
volunteer?
What are your motivations for
volunteering?
What are the motivations of the
volunteers in your teams?
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
2. Motivations
1) Seeing a need and feeling they can help meet it
2) Strong personal drivers – ‘I’ve always volunteered’
3) Family example
4) Desire to serve – ‘I want to give something back...’
5) A need to be needed
6) Friendship / social reasons
7) Personal – even selfish – motives – ‘To get out of the
house’
8) Guilt – ‘If I don’t no-one else will and it’ll close down’
9) Gaining fulfilment
10) Spiritual drive / religious faith
11) Desire to be part of a team
12) Simply because they’ve been asked
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
3. Daniel Goleman: ‘The
fundamental task of
leaders...is to prime good
feeling in those they
lead...the primal job of
leadership is emotional.’
If that is true, then recognising our
volunteers motivations for
volunteering at your children’s
group will help us to ‘prime good
feeling in them.’
Richard Steel: ‘Many
recognise, and are quite
open about, the good that
volunteering does to them,
as well as the good done
by them.’
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
4. In your context…
• How has the landscape of
volunteering and volunteers changed
over the last 3 years?
• Have there been any positive
changes?
• Have there been any negative
changes?
• What opportunities are there going
forward?
• What challenges are there going
forward?
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
5. Issues around volunteering today:
• Younger volunteers tend to volunteer for one-off events (e.g. Holiday clubs,
Spring Harvest etc) rather than week in week out
• Might see volunteering as a way to gain experience for a career they want to
go into
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
• Larger commitments in other areas of
their life
• Families spread out – weekends often
spent visiting family
• University students need to work during
holidays
• Are there any other issues around
volunteering today?
6. ‘Volunteers today demand, whether
explicitly or not, more time from
those who lead them. They respond
to appraisals (formal or not),
mentoring, regular reviews, volunteer
agreements. Gen X and Y are used to
them in their working life and they
expect their leaders, even in
voluntary situations, to be
professional.’
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
7. How were you ‘recruited’ into
your youth or children’s
work?
How are you managed in
your current position?
How do you recruit
volunteers in your current
context?
How do you manage your
volunteers?
‘Research has found that short-term volunteers are often recruited
by a friend or colleague, and that long-term volunteers tend to
become so through having a close link with existing volunteers or
the organisation over time.’
Emlyn Williams
If you are a volunteer… If you oversee
volunteers…
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
8. Recruitment
• Job or role description
• References
• Interview
• DBS
• Probationary period
• Decision to appoint
• Induction & Training
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
9. 1) Good Induction. What did you want to know when
you started?
• The vision and aims
• Key people they need to meet
• Relevant policies – child protection, health and
safety etc
• Relevant procedures – how things are done, team
meetings, other people’s roles etc
• Practical issues of where things are kept, how
equipment works
2) Clear expectations
• Two-way expectations: what are your
of your volunteer and what are their expectations
of you and what they’ll be doing?
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
10. 3) Tasks and Roles which, wherever possible, are tailored to the
volunteer
4) Training and Development both formal and informal.
5) Rewards – Jesus spoke about reward for service (Matt 5:12, 6:4,
10:41, 16:27, 19:29).
6) Ownership – talking about ‘us’ rather than ‘you.’ Good chance
that other volunteers will out last you, especially if you’re a paid
worker.
Williams: ‘Ownership is grown through the involvement of
volunteers in planning processes, decision making and evaluation
and through regular consultation.’
7) Support and Supervision
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
11. Supervision & Management
• Making good use of your supervision
• Accountability
• Mentor
• Your responsibilities over others
• Review sheets
• Appraisals
• Aims and goals to encourage growth
• Keeping a team on board
• Model what you want to see your leaders doing
with your children.
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
12. Your leaders / helpers should know
• your aims and goals (overall and specific)
• what you expect of them (behaviour and role)
• good safeguarding practice
• how to head up safely if you’re not there
• what to do if a child discloses information of a
safeguarding matter
• what the theme for the week/term is all about
• how to relate to the children (what is appropriate)
• the boundaries of the group and how to discipline
• other areas of training covered by Aurora…
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
13. Everybody can be great. Because anybody
can serve. You don’t have to have a college
degree to serve. You don’t have to make
your subject and your verb agree to serve.
You don’t have to know about Plato and
Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know
about Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.
You don’t need to know about the second
theory of thermo-dynamics in physics to
serve. You only need a heart full of grace
and a soul generated by love.
Martin Luther King Jr.
3f Making teams work – recruitment, supervision and training
Editor's Notes
If our volunteers volunteer because they want to help young girls in particular, then empower them to work more with the girls than with the boys. If their passion is to disciple young Christians, then enable them to focus more those who are wanting to explore issues of faith rather than those who just want to come to play pool…and if they’re wanting to engage more with those who are on the margins of faith, then let them hang out with young people over the pool table…
Covid 19 – massive volunteering drive and response, and there will be a mixture of all of the above motivations. Opportunities for some of those new volunteers to continue the other side of the Pandemic. There’s also a challenge around how to manage and recruit all the volunteers safely, and also manage volunteer expectations if there isn’t the volunteering opportunities they expected. E.g. I signed up to be a NHS First Responder volunteer, and with our local Age UK Centre…but haven’t been asked to do anything yet…
They’ll also be a whole group of people who would be chomping at the bit to volunteer, but can’t for a variety of reasons – health, childcare, age etc – and will be dealing with a whole bunch of guilt around that.
Break out rooms
It’s important that we take the role of recruiting volunteers seriously – and I would argue that we need to take it as seriously as we take recruiting paid employers in the work place. Our volunteers are investing spiritually into the lives of the young people that we work with, and therefore it’s important that they are the right people with the right skills and talents and hearts to do so. We spent a large part of Module 1 looking at our own calling, gifts and talents for a reason – because we believe it’s a calling to work with young people. In the right context, the recruitment process for our volunteers can help them with that discernment process.
