CEO Reflections | CREATIVE CONFLUENCE - A New Phase for Volunteer West
Image by Ross Findon on Unsplash
Disruption – that is the word of the year.
At Volunteer West, we are shaping the disruptive forces into a creative confluence to emerge as a refreshed and energetic organisation.
I was appointed to the CEO post at the end of February – yes, at the start of COVID. This also marked an internal transition, a new Board executive team and a changeover in core staff (parental leave and prior departures). All this amidst two government reviews of their volunteering strategy that would impact our programs and funding from mid-2021; and changes in relationships with local councils.
What did all these big changes mean in our first six months?
A lot of reaching out to ask and learn. Belief in people. Building on strengths. Then, a big breath and taking a punt - an informed one - to do things differently in an uncertain world.
I had just returned from Vietnam and Thailand, and so I had some sense of what COVID meant on the ground. It meant that our March Volunteering Expo was to be cancelled after months of hard work. It meant forecasting in mid-March and preparing for remote working by April so we could continue our core volunteer support services.
It meant imagining the new-normal. The government reviews also forced me to take stock of what volunteering in the West needed. I drew on insights from past work on social change and wisdom in public administration research to look for team members who were inter-disciplinary, who could practically shape things amidst ambiguity, and most importantly in a remote work setting, possess personal and professional integrity.
In April-May, we recruited and onboarded three staff; and worked our way through forming, storming, norming, and performing as a team – all done online, a practice relatively new at the time, and is now the COVID normal.
The strength of being a small organisation is our ability to be agile, quickly inhabiting the new-normal, and shaping our culture.
The Board executive team and staff were new to working in a volunteer resource centre, and we took the learning and building up the organisation - virtually - in our stride.
Our refreshed website is our online welcoming greeting and foyer, conveying the energy and potential of the West and our organisation. Our virtual ways of working (online meeting and training program, social media channels, 1800 free call number) are also supported by a growing number of committed volunteers across greater Melbourne using Zoom, Messenger, and good old telephones.
The team only met in person 4 times in the past six months and one of those occasions was to move our physical office into storage. We are of course Zooming, Teams-ing, socialising, doing quizzes, wearing fancy hats and holding crazy mugs, with a dash of Zoom fatigue and reminders that “you’re on mute”. We will be an international organisation with a team member travelling to Chicago soon too.
Six months on, the external disruptions are still in play.
The difference is the growing Volunteer West team are adept at working with a collaborative, adaptive, and reflexive ethos to make an impact where we can.