VolREACH update on International Volunteer Day 2021
Volunteer West’s volunteers at the International Volunteer Day picnic 2021.
On International Volunteer Day 2021, CEO Thu-Trang Tran celebrates volunteers’ amazing work at Volunteer West. She also shares great news that VolREACH, a platform that will support and raise the profile of the volunteering sector, is gathering momentum.
International Volunteer Day this Sunday 5 December coincides with end of year festivities. There is much to celebrate for us in Volunteer West, and in particular, in Victoria. We are out of lockdown, and like so many Victorians, are excited to have an in-person picnic! This is a rare chance, given the year we’ve had, where all our volunteers, staff, and Board, can meet, connect, celebrate community volunteers in our region.
Our Volunteer West volunteers continue to provide the community facing engagement, including our volunteer support referral system, where we help community members find potential volunteering placements (741 referrals in 2021). There are no wrong doors to volunteering: community members volunteer to learn a new skill to find work, to socially connect, to contribute to their community, to have fun.
Another team of volunteers – including a volunteer in Chicago – also support our communications across our engagement channels: our website, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, including facilitating our WestSeed 2.0 network of 119+ community organisations. Our communications volunteers share updates, insights, and promote the good work of community volunteers and organisations as part of our VolREACH audacious agenda to uplift the profile of volunteering in Melbourne’s West.
VolREACH – VOLunteer Research, Engagement, Advocacy Community Hubs – launched just 4 months ago is gathering momentum.
I am proud to share early advocacy and mobilising wins that is proof of the immense potential of VolREACH to unlock resources in and for communities in the West:
The Hon Bill Shorten MP, Federal Member for Maribyrnong, has formally provided his support for VolREACH in his letter: “Volunteer West, and their innovative programs such as VolREACH, should receive investment equal to the
value it provides the community.”VolREACH is living up to its catalysing platform model, recently securing in principle, University of Melbourne’s Social Equity Institute (MSEI) investment of $100K+ in the form of funding and supervision for a PhD research project .
Our aim for VolREACH to be a platform for cross-sector “ready-consortia” is also bearing fruit with five large collaborative grant submissions with our supporters (e.g. Victoria University, Brotherhood of St Laurence, peer volunteer resource centers). That’s $1M+ of joint funding proposals.
Our Volunteer Collective Impact Framework is gaining resonance, with a couple of partners willing to work with us to start building a Victorian common data set that tracks longitudinally the manifold impact of volunteering in terms of a) employability b) wellbeing c) volunteering confidence.
We are finalising clearance for a research report (commissioned by DFFH Brimbank) into CALD volunteering towards COVID recovery that proposes a novel model for community volunteering, namely fluid volunteering, rather than the 'informal' volunteering label that can be disenfranchising for CALD communities.
Last by not least, the end of the year allows us to take stock of Highlights for 2021, particularly the $1M+ Working for Victoria (WFV) funding – the largest to date focused on volunteering infrastructure for the region – that provided direct employment opportunities to 28 people for up to 6 months, and more than 90% have since have found employment after their WFV contract.