Celebrating our volunteers

Myself and the CLEAR volunteers are currently in the midst of organising our Kirklees Volunteer Fair – an event to celebrate National Volunteer Week.

The event will be held at The Huddersfield Mission and is already fully booked up with an array of local charities who will be there promoting a variety of volunteering opportunities. We are also providing a ‘photo corner’ on stage so organisations can hold up our home made gratitude placards and send them to their volunteers or print them out for the office. Our team have taken on different event management tasks, including stage and introductions, promotion, photography, slide show production and all things technical. We’re really looking forward to a good networking and recruitment event and hope to inspire lots of potential volunteers!

Thank you Volunteering Kirklees Network for supporting this event.

In the last year we have seen our CLEAR volunteer team go from strength to strength – building confidence, attending lots of training and community events on behalf of Community Links and establishing strong positive working relationships with staff and service users.

What are we hoping our voluntary service will look like in future? We hope to continually evolve and offer flexibility within well-structured and supported volunteering environment allowing us to make the best of the wealth of professional and lived experience our volunteers possess – and wish to share. We want our volunteers to feel their roles are rewarding and challenging and that they are being provided with ongoing development opportunities in order that they can help and support clients. We are currently looking at mapping the journey through volunteering – focusing on progression and autonomy for our more experienced volunteers. This will free up space for new volunteers to join at group level and also create additional roles for those more experienced to lead the way and mentor newer recruits.

So there is quite a lot going on! However, we do have a days worth of mini bus travel already booked so a nice wellbeing day trip out is on the horizon. I’m just waiting for the CLEAR volunteer event planning team to decide where we are going…!

Massive thanks to a great team.

Abi MacDonald, CLEAR Volunteer Coordinator