Training Ideas, Resources, Tools

Hong Kong has a long history of developing volunteer services. People from all walks of life are familiar with the concept of volunteerism while a wide variety of specific volunteer opportunities have been opening up, ranging from management roles to the execution of specific projects and tasks. The quality of volunteers and the sustainability of volunteer participation have become significant concerns within many volunteer organizations. It is expected that volunteers shall be well trained and equipped with adequate knowledge and appropriate skills to serve the needy. Further, it is believed that the enhancement of volunteer competencies and increased job satisfaction will lead to a higher commitment to volunteering.

The Agency for Volunteer Service (AVS) maintains a pool of over 10,000 volunteers and, in order to address some of these issues, established its Volunteer Training and Development Centre in 2003. A new initiative of the Centre is the “VQ Sustainable Training Scheme,“ promoting “Volunteer Quotient towards Volunteer Quality” – an attempt to provide progressive training to enhance the quality of AVS volunteers as well as to sustain their commitment to and aspiration of helping others.

This article provides an overview of what VQ is, how the training is structured, the three levels of achievement, who is being trained and who is doing the training, and other elements of the pilot project underway.

Once in a while, a volunteer is injured, or injures someone else, in the course of his or her work. Sometimes, it is just an allegation that the volunteer injured someone else; whether or not the allegation is true, a legal defense still is required. In many cases, the cost of the incident is greater than the volunteer's own ability to pay, which is why insurance protection for volunteers should be part of every nonprofit organization's risk strategy. Even so, prevention is better than cure, and there is a lot you can do to prevent accidents from happening in the first place.

In this article, we will describe the circumstances involved in the claims we see in our Volunteers Insurance Service (VIS ® ) program, and offer guidance to help you minimize the chance that such claims might happen to your own volunteers.

Injuries caused by volunteers to themselves or to others tend to fall into a few common claims scenarios which we'll cover in this article by the three types of volunteer insurance coverage that respond:

• accident medical reimbursement
• personal liability
• excess automobile liability
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  • Read more about Volunteers' Most Common Accidents - and How to Avoid Them

As Managers of Volunteer Resources, Executive Directors and other leaders of volunteer programs in nonprofit organizations, you are dealing with one constant: CHANGE. To stay current with trends in the volunteerism field, technology advances, new management systems, etc., you are challenged to lead organizations in new directions and with methodology to engage volunteers to have the most impact. But, too often your desire to promote a change is met with subtle or not-so-subtle signs of resistance. As you suggest changes you might hear these and other laments from staff and volunteers:

So, how do we encourage a readiness for change and a motivation to implement and sustain it?

Change theory is the subject matter of hundreds of books and thousands of articles. It is not the intent of this training exercise to trivialize change or make it appear as something that can be resolved by simply filling in the blanks of a formula. Rather this training design features a tool which can be useful as a separate coaching guide or as an exercise in a more in-depth training session dealing with the complexity of change.

Every one of us has experienced at least one if not many times when we approached an organization and were treated in a less than satisfactory way. Perhaps it was the first time we arrived to volunteer and no one really knew what to do with us. How many of us have called an organization to get information only to be put on hold and transferred repeatedly, causing us to re-tell our story over and over again? Maybe it was the lack of signs outside to direct us to the right place. These experiences are “moments of truth”: moments that cumulatively create our opinion of an organization. The key to examining the moments of truth in your organization is first to recognize them and then work to eliminate the negative ones so that you create mostly positive moments of truth for your volunteers. This Training Design provides strategies for doing this.

Good, skilled people in the field of volunteer management are often unsuccessful because they function reactively in programs where there is little or no true commitment, understanding or support for developing and sustaining a healthy, cutting-edge volunteer program. Individuals leading volunteer programs must not only be excellent technicians but also be able to proactively influence individuals and systems to work effectively with volunteers. Betty Stallings takes you step-by-step through the process of developing your own persuasion strategy.

Rather than offering a training design, I'd like instead to share a lot of quick ideas with you that I have learned and found invaluable in almost 30 years as a trainer. Instead of adding more words than you would ever want to read about each idea, let me just offer them in "kernel" fashion, in the hope that some of them will pop into your brain when you need them the most… in front of an audience!