Reflections from Marijke | Scale Up
What does it feel like to scale up an organisation from 4 part time staff to one with over 25 employees? And more importantly how do you do it in a way that is informed and reflective of your values.
These are the challenges I was faced with when Volunteer West was successful in securing a $1million dollar grant through the State Government’s Working for Victoria initiative.
Like many people, I lost my job back in April of 2020 due to the impacts of COVID. I joined Volunteer West in a part-time capacity, joining new CEO, Thu-Trang Tran, along with 2 other part time staff. As a new team, we developed ways of working in a virtual environment, redefined our organisation’s mission and purpose and articulated the values through which we wanted to work.
Illustration: Marijke’s Four Reflections
Volunteer West’s mission is to improve the health and well-being of people in Melbourne’s west through meaningful volunteering that empowers and engages.
Audacity
To do this at greater scale, recognising the needs of the community following COVID, we aimed high and applied for funding at a scale significantly higher than before. We built strong networks and delivered our core services all whilst navigating lockdown and uncertainty. We added our voice to state and national conversations. This audacity has seen us successfully win projects, build new channels, and tell our story in new ways. It has also taught us to believe in ourselves.
Impact
Through scaling up we are able to increase the impact of the work we are doing. Individually, the impact of the scale up on our employees’ lives is tangible, people working, developing skills and networks, and the confidence to move further into long-term employment. This scale up is also allowing us to:
build further evidence on the health and well-being benefits of volunteering
shine a light on the value of place-based volunteering support services like ours
design an impact model to guide our work that makes clearer the rippling impacts of volunteering
Empathy
This has not been easy, it’s required a lot from those of us already working hard, we’ve had to dig deep and efficiently utilise the resources we had available. We worked with empathy, we considered how to bring new staff into our team in a way that recognised their strengths. We had to be kind to ourselves as we made mistakes and learned from them. We also recognised the support required for the behavioural and personal changes to people's lives this new work-from-home/hybrid model brings. We design our services to consider the people we work with, our staff, volunteers, managers of volunteers and the community, and develop programs that meet people where they are.
Amplify
As we adopt a strength-based approach to engaging staff, volunteers and the community we serve, we can amplify their strengths through providing pragmatic support and a supportive environment.
Now we can tell our story and the stories of the diverse volunteers who build the community we love in the West.
Our values helped guide us through this process, sometimes in unexpected ways, and I cannot wait to see what we achieve over the next six months.
Connect with Marijke on LinkedIn here.
