Flurries of interest

The month of April brought a flurry of interest from what I consider to be some key personnel in the UK voluntary sector. Take for instance:

- the Rt Hon Angela Smith, Minister for the Third Sector of the current UK government. She wanted to discover a bit more about HFH, so a meeting was arranged with one of her mistrial reps. I am now following up some leads that this ministerial rep gave me at the meeting.

- Then there was Rob Jackson, one of the Directors of Volunteering England who is now helping me to encourage Volunteer Centres to take a look at the micro actions featured on HFH. He’s asked me to write an article on this issue for the Volunteering England magazine.

- Also included is Jamie Thomas, who is CEO of Red Foundation and i-volunteer and the person behind the setting up of do-it.org.uk, the UK’s national volunteer online database. He has proposed an idea to me which is also aimed at encouraging volunteer centres to include micro volunteer actions on their database.

Part of this interest has come about because of a survey I conducted into the micro volunteer arena. I contacted exactly 350 initiatives from HFH’s database and received 26 replies. Not a quantity that will produce any meaningful results, but nevertheless a few interesting trends were noted eg. the high level of repeat volunteering and the extremely high number of initiatives wanting to be included on UK Volunteer Centre ‘books’.

I added a couple of new pages to HFH last month. One of them was to do with a collection of articles about the micro volunteering arena which can be viewed here and the other was the first of many pages for a new campaign to promote volunteering in your lunch break – aimed mainly at office workers. The tagline for the campaign is ‘Change The World In Just Your Lunch Break’ and is the first step in accomplishing one of the ideas on the ‘Our Vision’ page. Hope you’ll check it out as the actions have been collected together on a cafe style food menu – something which I think has not been tried before and something which has potential within the internet café market.

I attended an Awards Day last month, hosted by UnLtd, who are the current funders of HFH. Met some amazing people who are running some amazing initiatives. I am simply in awe of them and it’s a whole new world for me, to see people doing so much good.

Til next time

A Few Meetings

Held a few meetings with the Cardiff Institute for the Blind and Royal National Institute for the Blind Cymru over the past month. I approached them to see if there was any scope in introducing some of the home based volunteering actions featured on HFH to some of the visually impaired people, who through their circumstances may spend a greater proportion of their time at home than sighted people. They seemed to like the idea to the point that they intend to initiate a pilot project to see how it goes. If successful, then they intend for this scheme to go nationwide.

The way it would operate would be for volunteers to go out to people’s houses in their normal course of volunteering with the blind and introduce them to the concept of micro volunteering. If they grab the bait, so to speak, then the volunteer would initially help them to become more involved with whatever micro action they’re interested in. This is quite an exciting project and it has been suggested that I may be invited to give a presentation on HFH to RNIB HQ in order to kickstart the project before it goes nationwide. Watch this space!

Received an invite from Volunteering England to attend a roundtable session on innovation in volunteering, hosted by no less than Angela Smith, MP, Minister for the Third Sector at The Cabinet Office in Whitehall, London. The invite went out to ‘key volunteer involving organisations’. I didn’t attend it as I got invite too late to rearange other commitments. Apparently, it turned out to be a useful meeting with lost of interesting points raised.

On the back of this Roundtable sesh, I then got a personal invitation from THE Angela Smith mentioned above to attend THE Cabinet Office at Whitehall, London to discuss HFH with one of her staff members. At time of writing, time and date of meeting is still to be arranged. Watch this space!

During the merry month of March, I conducted a survey amongst most of the micro volunteering initiatives feature on HFH's online and offline database in order to produce a snapshot of the current state of the micro volunteering arena. You can download it here. There wasn't a huge response to this survey, but it did highlight some potential interesting trends about repeat volunteering and UK Volunteer Centres. Although the survey was by no means a comprehensive one, it is hoped that it will serve as a springboard for other orgs within the UK voluntary sector to do some further research and so bring greater awareness of the micro volunteering sector to the general public. Watch this space!

Til next time.