Volunteering

The latest evidence that Capital Volunteering is working, based on the evaluation of the programme, has just been produced in a fourth interim report by the Institute of Psychiatry.

It describes the volunteering experiences, health and quality of life, service use and social inclusion of the 95 members of the research cohort who were followed up at 12 months. The original cohort comprised 150 people recruited from 51 Capital Volunteering projects in 11 London boroughs. Baseline interviews took place between July 2005 and January 2007, when participants first joined a local project. They were followed up at 6 months and finally at 12 months. It also presents peoples expectations and experiences of taking part in Capital Volunteering projects.

If you would like more information, contact Sofie Gullberg: 020 7812 0032, sgullberg@csv.org.uk

Download Report Summary (PDF):

Capital.Volunteering.4th.Interim.Report.pdf

Mental Health, Volunteering and Social Inclusion

Founded in 1962, Community Service Volunteers (CSV) is now the largest volunteering and training charity in the UK. CSV has more than 15,000 partnerships with statutory, public, private sector and voluntary organisations, community groups and the media, and last year involved 230,000 volunteers in meeting social need and in providing innovative responses to social challenges.

This report focuses on the Capital Volunteering programme in London, and CSV's mental health volunteering and training projects with the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust.

Download report (PDF):

CSV.Reports.on.19.pdf

Findings from the 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey

This research aims to gain a better understanding of the benfits of participation in employer-supported volunteering and giving schemes through an analysis of results from the first Home Office Citizenship Survey, conducted in 2001. Employer-supported volunteering is when you employer releases you to do some voluntary work in your local community as part of your job.

Anyone who would like to volunteer for Develop should e-mail: volunteering@developbromley.com.

Anyone wanting to volunteer to work in local mental health services can contact Develop partners via the home page or via the Bromley Volunteer Centre website.

Download as a PDF file:

Employer.Supported.Volunteering.pdf

Written by the NDTi's Peter Bates and Develop's Fabian Davis, this article questions the traditional approach to service design, which merely leads to model replication. In order to design a service effectively for a local community this article identifies a need for ‘outside-in' service design to truly reflect the needs and environment of a particular community.

Using the example of volunteering projects, the authors identify nine key factors that impact on the effective implementation of projects and suggest that consideration of these should form a template for other outside-in analyses by leaders. The authors pose a series of questions that leaders can apply to their own settings in order to explore the issues raised in this article.

Download article:

Outside-in.service.design.pdf