Outreach Services

Due to financial support in the form of grant aid from Southwark Council we are able to offer an outreach service to organisations that promote volunteering to their clients. If your organisation does promote volunteering to your clients there are several services that are open to you, dependant upon current uptake and resources.

This page covers:

How to Promote Volunteering to Clients
Volunteering Talks and Workshops
One to One Advice Sessions
Additional Support from Volunteer Centre Southwark

How to Promote Volunteering to Clients

More about how to register is covered in the registering pages (link) If you are with a client who has a clear idea of what they want to do, it is usually best if you either phone us for a pack to be sent to them, or direct them to this website where they can gather more information and be linked through to www.do-it.org.uk where we put our opportunities online and they can register. Alternately if they are unsure about things it is often best to phone in and book an appointment.

Volunteering Talks and Workshops

If you have a group of people who are interested in volunteering, we can come in and deliver a presentation or workshop on volunteering and how to get involved. The format of these sessions is usually as follows:

What is volunteering? How to go about finding opportunities How to find the right opportunity for you How to narrow down the choices

Volunteering as a two way exchange of skills What Volunteer Centres are and how they work How to get going and make the opportunity work for you Things that could go wrong and how to overcome them

We can also run a similar session for people who broker information to clients e.g. careers advisors, student advice teams, community psychiatric nurses

It is possible that these talks could function as a one off or as a regular part of training e.g. we talk at some homeless/long term unemployed projects every 5-8 weeks, which run life skills/back to work projects. As a workshop these sessions usually take about 30 to 50 minutes to run depending upon numbers and the amount of questions people ask. Shorter talks are of course possible, so if you would like us to deliver a 10-minute talk to a group, such as a school assembly, residents association, church congregation please do let us know.

One to One Advice Sessions

Depending upon resources we can come in and offer one to one advice sessions with your clients. During a session we can look at options that are open to someone and then use a laptop to look at current opportunities. There are certain parameters that have to be met for this to be successful. Please get in touch to discuss this.

Additional Support from Volunteer Centre Southwark

Once someone has registered and received their information from Volunteer Centre Southwark it is down to them to decide which opportunity they would like to do, and then contact them directly. We can help if the volunteer would like us to make the initial call linking up the volunteer and the organisation. Also if a problem arises during the person's time as a volunteer we can act on their behalf to help mediate or resolve a situation.

We do not monitor what happens to every person who registers with us, so do not know if a certain person who has registered has taken up an opportunity. If you need to know what happens to a people whom you have referred to us you need to contact them directly as we don't necessarily know if they have started somewhere, and because of data protection/client confidentiality we can not tell you anyway.