We Need to Challenge The Challenge

So - unskilled volunteers are the least valuable way in which a company can support charities and yet charities feel that they’re the most likely form of support they’ll be offered…….so says a recent report from CAF. Hardly unexpected, but why is this STILL the case?

Many years ago I worked for a job training programme. In my first week we had a team of volunteers from one of the large banks come in to paint the walls of our classrooms. For this we had to close the offices meaning our clients missed out on a day of training, employment and counselling services. At the end of the day a group of volunteers overheard one of our staff complaining that the young men and women from deprived neighbourhoods in the city were losing out ‘just so a group of overpaid bankers could get a free team building day’. Not exactly what we were hoping for!

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of community centres, schools, country paths and other places that really benefit from these ‘challenge events’ and they can be an invaluable way of achieving dramatic change in a very short period of time. But for each successful event, there is at least one that was not necessary and left everyone frustrated. So why do they still form the mainstay of almost all Employer Supported Volunteering Programmes?

The vast majority of companies, and certainly of their staff who are volunteering, have good intentions and would like their time to be as valuable as possible. But just as we have fundraising targets to achieve and grants to deliver on, so they have middle managers who don’t want to lose their staff on a regular basis, and senior managers who are demanding ever higher numbers of volunteers. The appeal of challenge events to them is obvious.

About 5 years ago I was chairing a meeting of the wonderful and now inexplicably defunct Employees in the Community Network run by Volunteering England when, after some minutes of this sort of talk one of the corporate delegates burst out with “but if you don’t want us to run challenge events, why the hell don’t you just tell us?”. It was a good question then and it remains a good question now. Is it because we think it’s a foot in the door – we might get more support, even financial, in the future. Is it because we think we could convert the individuals to regular volunteering opportunities. Or is it simply because we’ve been approached, it sounds like a good idea and we don’t want to turn down any help from a company? We complain that Challenge Events are all we are being offered – but why are we waiting for companies to come and offer things to us? Why aren’t we the proactive ones, showing them how they could best help us and themselves?

We can talk about developing the business case for skilled volunteering, creating new models for evaluation or even a massive marketing campaign but until we, the voluntary sector, take responsibility the situation is unlikely to change. What do we actually want from volunteers? If we need specific skills let’s go out and try and find them. If we’re approached about a team of 20 accountants who want to paint our wall, again, we need to have the guts, and the integrity, to say ‘thanks, but no thanks’. The current financial situation means far more companies are setting up Employee Volunteering Programmes – let’s make sure they’re really valuable to all of us.

And that job training programme? We went back to the company, told them what our real needs were, they explained why they contacted us in the first place, and we created a completely new system of volunteering with mock interviews, mentoring and champions to lobby their HR departments – oh, and one challenge event a year at a community project suggested by our clients!

Posted by Fabia Bates, Director of Corporate Community Involvement at Red Foundation and former Employee Volunteering Development Director at Business in the Community