Volunteer Strategy Gathering/February 2015

Context

This is the second Volunteer Strategy Gathering, following 3 months after the initial gathering held in Birmingham in November 2014.

Proposals

The following are ideas that people may wish to discuss at the gathering and take forward from there.

• Open Badges
• Education Program Extension
• A more devolved approach

Suggestions following the November 2014 event

The following suggestions for this event were made by different people following the previous event.

Newbies

• Follow-up on progress since the last meeting.
• Summary of the Post-It mania, and a list of concrete suggestions what the chapter could do, for discussion.

Project-based volunteering

• More workshops, maybe some hack-space e.g. to work on developing tools or ideas on the Wiki.
• More specifics on how project-based volunteering would actually work in practice. Who would decide which projects get supported? What specific mechanisms would we use to ensure our charitable funds are spent wisely?
• As I said, I think a "teamwork" discussion is needed. There was little enough chance in Birmingham for volunteers to express their views of how the current "volunteer strategy" is run. (...) There really need to be a session to grasp the nettle, and deal with staff and trustees' need to be pro-active in making life easier for volunteers who want to be involved with the chapter, in return for asking that volunteers are more thoughtful about resources and impact.

Fewer presentations

• Event organisers: I think the previous event had all of the elements it needed, so I'd like to see more of the same. The only thing I would change is fitting in slightly fewer presentations/activities to leave more time for discussion and getting to know new people. The actual discussions within the activities were brilliant, but we lacked the time to refine any of the ideas proposed.
• Fewer presentations and more discussion. Discussions of the gender gap or fundraising are very interesting and important, but deserve more time than can be afforded in a short slot and aren't directly relevant to the problems of volunteering within WMUK.

Newbies

• More new people coming
• Bring more new volunteers in. Volunteers working together on potential projects.

Other

• It felt like after each talk, we didn't have feedback as to what we could concretely take home and act upon. And the event became a bit too political at the end... unavoidable however it would've been nice to have a healthy debate rather than just sporadic chatter.
• Something on strategic thinking - we had a lot of the ingredients of strategy on the day but…
• The later afternoon lacked structure so people who wanted to swamp the conversation with points of view did so easily rather than help the group to expand their understanding of the topic
• The train journey to Birmingham was fine for me, but I couldn't have arrived at the meeting any earlier than I did (a bit after 10)....so I would prefer something low key to start the meeting.

See also

• Technology workshop 2014-15