8 May 2024

“The key to working collaboratively is having an open mind.”

Some of the great projects you already have

• Groups facilitated by volunteers for people who have long term health conditions.
• Hospital companions doing advance care planning.
• Volunteers who are opticians, alongside their volunteering role, are using their unique skills to deliver sessions about eye care.
• A cohort of volunteers arrange and run their own community engagement sessions in their local communities.
• One organisation has developed empowerment training for carers, and it has been so successful that they have now been able to adapt the course for other organisations.
• Home from Hospital Service – provides support and help, usually with quite complex discharges from hospital. This service works closely with the GP surgery and Social Prescribers, filling in the gaps for them by letting them know what they have done to facilitate the patient going home.

Challenges and ideas

“There is the enthusiasm and the ambition to start working more collaboratively but it's quite tricky to get the right people on board and to manage expectations and boundaries.”

• Funding: The commissioning process can create competition with regard to securing funding for your organisation. The third sector provider's funding situations are often precarious so it can be difficult to plan projects or partnerships that are sustainable.
• Culture changing. Taking existing volunteering opportunities and developing them in a more collaborative way. The roles may have always been done a set way for a long period of time, so it can be a challenge to encourage people to take a different approach.
• Empowering the volunteers to take on more while making sure that they keep to a brief.

• Aligning training and values with the organisation you are working with.
• Finding the right channel to communicate with volunteers.

• After spending time and money on training a new volunteer they may be poached by another organisation.
• One hospice is inundated with people who want to volunteer however many do not realise when applying that not every patient they meet will be going home and that to support the patient and their family requires the right skills and resilience for that type of environment.
• Know exactly what the organisations you are working with can do and that they can meet your expectations, ensuring that people are referred to the correct service in the first instance.

TOP TIP

Invite members of the other organisations that you are working with to a regular Team Meeting. This will offer the opportunity for you all to get to know each other, ask questions and better understand what the services can or cannot do.

Success Story

“Be enthusiastic and passionate about what you’ve got to offer.”

• Things have moved on from the thinking that volunteers can only do so much. In one organisation taking on volunteers as End-of-Life companions was a major step towards staff and professionals understanding what volunteers are capable of.