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
