• Volunteer Centre Projects
• Stepping Stones
  
• The Resettlement Project
• The New Deal
• Good Practice
• The V-Youth Project
• Core Services

See what you could be doing

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Good Practice

At the Volunteer Centre we recognise that volunteering can offer an important way for many people who might otherwise feel on the margins of society to gain confidence, skills and contacts.  In many cases volunteering can offer a route into other activities such as employment, education or other volunteering roles that would otherwise not have been possible.

We work with organisations to strengthen inclusive volunteering for a wide range of people, many of whom would have otherwise have encountered barriers and obstacles to volunteering. These can include inadequate transport services, lack of confidence, expenses and a range of disability access and inclusion issues that have not been attended to.

The centre is particularly proud to be part of the Government’s GoldStar Exemplar Programme for various strands of our work with homeless people, prisoners, the long-term unemployed and people living with ongoing mental health and disability. We have always pioneered work for these people, recognising as we do that they represent a rich and largely untapped volunteer resource in our local community.

Work promoting the benefits of Inclusive Volunteering to Volunteer Involving Organisations includes:

• Inclusive Volunteering Guidance including the Implications of the Disability Discrimination Act
• Inclusive Volunteering Training Courses provided in-house or as part of the Volunteer Management Training Programme
• Conferences: Inclusive Volunteering March 2008  
• Our partnership with AbilityNet  to enable Organisations in the Borough to improve the accessibility of their websites