about us
The Volunteer Centre has continually evolved ever since its creation in the mid 1990’s. We are now one of the largest centres in the country carrying out innovative work to support volunteering and active citizenship in Southwark. We are a team of approximately 40 people, which includes about 20 paid members of staff, 10 volunteers and 10 trustees.
Our role is about ‘Making Volunteering Easy’
We feel this sums up everything we are trying to do as we are:
Making it easy: for you to be an active citizen, find out about volunteering and getting involved in the community
Making it easy: for you to involve volunteers in your group
Making it easy: for your business to volunteer its time in the community
In this section you can find out more about our work, from seeing who the staff team are and how they can help you, to learning more about our history, our strategic plan for the next 5 years, annual report and our customer charter.
What does Volunteer Centre Southwark do?
Our mission
Our mission has been defined as to promote more and better volunteering in Southwark. In addition to this we carry out 6 core functions to be able to call ourselves a Volunteer Centre. These are Brokerage of opportunities, marketing volunteering, good practice development, development of volunteering opportunities, policy response and campaigning and strategic development of volunteering.
Our philosophy and strap-line
Our philosophy is about ‘Making Volunteering Easy’ and we introduced this as our strap line in 2009. Making Volunteering Easy is about:
- Making it easy for voluntary groups and organisations to involve volunteers
- Making it easy for people to find out about volunteering
- Making it easy for people to use volunteering to improve their life chances
- Making it easy for employees from big businesses to volunteer in the community
Some background to our activities
Volunteer Centre Southwark has been in operation since 1996. From its initial conception as an organisation that was supporting volunteering around community safety initiatives in Peckham we have grown to be the Volunteer Centre for Southwark.
Growth has been particularly rapid over the last 5 years when we moved from the Willowbrook Centre in Peckham to offices in Bankside, and in 2010, to offices at Elephant & Castle. We’ve also, in conjunction with other Volunteer Bureaux across the country we re-branded from Volunteers in Action Southwark to Volunteer Centre Southwark. In 5 years the team has grown tremendously from 5 to 18 members of staff.
Key achievements over the last 5 years include:
Supporting groups to involve volunteers: there are currently 750 groups registered with us, with about 400 different volunteer opportunities available at any one time. We provide information and advice to groups on issues around good practice in involving volunteers, run training develop resources around volunteer management. We also host the Volunteer Management Forum, a quarterly meeting for anyone working with volunteers to get together and look at issues around volunteer management.
Provision of information about volunteering: from 2003-10 we have registered over 23,500 people who want to volunteer in Southwark.
Development of work around active citizenship: funding from the Southwark Alliance and Take Part Network has enabled us to develop the Active Citizens Hub, an innovative project which aims to support people to be more active in the community and to think more widely about how they volunteer their time.
Engaging the Business Community: Begun in 1999, Involve is one of the Centre’s long standing projects. In 2009-10 the project supported over 80 voluntary groups by running 122 one-day volunteering projects. These involved 1653 corporate volunteers, and contributed 9918 hours of work to the community.
Using volunteering to increase employability: We have a huge demand for our services from people who want to use volunteering to get a job. We have been running a volunteering as work experience project for 5 years with support from different funders including Southwark Works! and Southwark Council EDT.
Using volunteering to improve mental wellbeing: Support over the last three years from CSV Capital Volunteering, and now from Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity has enabled us to develop our supported volunteering project, engaging people with mental ill health to volunteer and be supported in their volunteering.