Hampshire County Council

Recreation and Heritage Policy Review Committee Item 11

23 March 2006

The use of volunteers within Recreation & Heritage

Report of the Director of Recreation & Heritage

Contact: Caroline Dudley (01962) 826700 e-mail: [email protected]

1. Introduction

1.1 The practice of volunteering carries benefits to all who participate in it, and has been a feature of the work of all four services within Recreation and Heritage for many years.

1.2 The input by volunteers is essential to supplement the capacity of paid staff in all departments, either by a simple increase in numbers carrying out labour-intensive tasks, often true for countryside projects or, as happens in museums and archives, by accepting the help of specialists with skills and knowledge which supplement those of the regular staff. Additionally, the support that the County Council as a whole receives from organisations such Hampshire Ambassadors is invaluable.

1.3 In this way the volunteers provide a direct benefit to the departments concerned. However, there are also very real benefits to the volunteers themselves. Volunteering can bring satisfaction, companionship, purpose, physical exercise and intellectual stimulation to participants, all essential contributions to the achievement of well-being that is the goal of our service. Moreover, volunteering is entirely sustainable, a low cost activity which can continue on a regular basis, often over many years.

1.4 Given the all-round benefits of volunteering, the purpose of this report is to quantify the level and nature of the use of volunteers within Recreation and Heritage and to explore ways of improving the experience of volunteers and extending the practice.

2. Sport and Community

2.1 Volunteers are involved in sport at every level in clubs throughout the county. Sport and Community in its role as an enabler encourages and regulates this activity, setting out principles and guidelines for clubs to follow when using volunteers and providing training. For example, under the scheme Step into Sport, young people can learn to officiate in sport as well as compete, building confidence and self-esteem while fulfilling an interest and enabling participation without necessarily being a player. To enable this, Sport and Community runs and facilitates courses for young referees.

2.2 Volunteering is also a tool for combating anti-social behaviour. An example of this is the Junior Wardens scheme in Andover, where young people volunteer to take part in activities to improve the environment such as tree-planting, which has proved very effective in deterring vandalism.

2.3 The service also supports and encourages volunteers working with older people in the community, through village hall committees and community centres. In the context of the direction of development of Adult Services, there is great scope for increasing the involvement of volunteers in this arena.

3. Archives

3.1 The Hampshire Record Office employs c.30 volunteers at the HRO mainly inputting data, transcribing letters, indexing documents etc., vital tasks related to the core business of the service which are a very welcome supplement to the programme of the regular staff. Some volunteers work in the HRO itself and others work from home.

3.2 Many volunteers are also members of the Hampshire Archives Trust, and either have a special interest or expertise in some aspect of the work of the HRO. As in museums (below) although members may not actually work as volunteers in the HRO, they give their time to serve on committees supporting the case for archives in Hampshire, and they also raise funds for the HRO.

3.3 The HRO does not set out to recruit volunteers at present - recruits usually approach the HRO themselves with offers of help. However, the 2006/07 HRO Service Plan will include the creation of a more formal Hampshire Archives Volunteers scheme, which will set out to recruit and train volunteers and give them a more formal status within the organisation. This will have the advantage that volunteers can be given more responsibility and will be asked to carry out a greater variety of work, including outreach and "housekeeping" roles.

3.4 This will link into a new project currently awaiting approval for an Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant, which will allow the HRO to employ a Community Archives Development Officer whose aim will be to recruit and train c.100 volunteers to work in the community with local history groups, community groups etc. to develop their interest in and understanding of their local history. This scheme fits well with the agenda for encouraging volunteers to work with older people in the community and for older people themselves to become involved.

4. Museums

4.1 Museums have long relied on volunteers to help with a range of specialist activities, drawing on the lifetime skills and expertise of older or retired people. The Hampshire Museums Service currently employs c.150 volunteers in this role. However, they also have a long track record of offering opportunities for work experience and work placements for school children and students, and for people returning to work after physical or mental illness. There are opportunities for offering work experience to young people leaving care which could also be developed.

4.2 Most of the HCCMAS Community Museums have Friends groups, which the service is actively seeking to encourage and bring together through the publication of a joint Friends newsletter. Even where Friends are not actually engaged in voluntary work in a museum, they often give their time to serve on committees and to raise funds for the local museum. As such they are to be warmly encouraged.

4.3 The Museums Service has submitted an application to the HLF for a scheme which has a potential link to the HRO Community Archives project described above. The scheme is based around the creation of 36 Reminiscence Boxes - collections of historic objects from the museum's collections which are designed to encourage older people to remember interesting aspects of the past. These boxes will be distributed around the county for use by Community Curators within local museums and out in the community with groups such as Club Hampshire. They would also be useable by volunteers working within community centres and village halls with groups of older people. However, they also offer the opportunity for the Community Archives project to feed into the content of the boxes to give them real local relevance and to provide a mechanism through which the work of the CAO could be shared.

5. Arts

5.1 The Arts Service works with c.60/70 village halls, involving c.100 volunteer promoters all of whom are passionate about sustaining the village halls and who work incredibly hard to keep them going. The role of the Arts Service is to support them by providing arts activities through the county's rural touring scheme Hog the Limelight and to organise an annual showcase event in different parts of Hampshire, bringing all volunteers together to network and preview the programme of events.

5.2 The county's four arts centres have varying levels of volunteer help, but approximately 20 in total. They play a vital role in the smooth running of the centres, mainly in front of house duties, some office work, publicity mail outs and acting as stewards during evening performances.

6. Countryside

6.1 Volunteers contribute over 6,000 days of their time to the Countryside Service every year, either directly in Countryside schemes or indirectly working with groups and forums supported by Countryside.

6.2 Volunteers contribute directly by undertaking practical work for the service such as habitat management, access improvements and wildlife recording.

6.3 Indirectly volunteers work on projects such as the Hampshire Paths Partnership, where a parish or community group wants to do work to improve access somewhere by clearing paths, re-surfacing, repairing stiles, etc. The role of the Countryside Service here is to set up a group or volunteers with a formal agreement as to the scale and nature of the work to be undertaken, with insurance arranged and official HCC approval.

6.4 A Small Grants Scheme has been set up to grant funding to Parish Councils and landowners to undertake access improvements and promotion including leaflets and map boards.

6.5 Volunteers also work for advisory groups and statutory forums such as the Hampshire Countryside Access Forum, and there are individuals and less formal groups who contribute to the work of the Countryside Service.

6.6 Plans for the future include involving older people on projects in the countryside where the work carried out is less important than the social purpose and the well-being of those involved.

7. Libraries

7.1 Libraries in Hampshire have encouraged the participation of volunteers for many years in a variety of schemes. 300 people volunteer to take books to house-bound people across the county, and a further 1000 or more belong to the more recent Good Neighbours scheme, where people offer to come to the library to exchange books on behalf of a house-bound neighbour.

7.2 Volunteers also come to the libraries to teach others how to use the Internet and help with adult learning and children's reading schemes.

7.3 These voluntary schemes are advertised through posters in libraries inviting participation, and some programmes such as the Good Neighbours scheme offers benefits such as a special ticket which exempts both the GN and the person being helped from book fines, for example.

8. Summary

8.1 All services within Recreation and Heritage fully support the use of volunteers and are looking for ways in which to encourage volunteering and to improve the training and conditions for volunteers. Recreation and Heritage has a policy on volunteers, but it was acknowledged that there was scope for improvement in the way that the public is made aware of opportunities for offering their services and in the way that they are welcomed and managed.

Recommendation

That Members support the following actions:

_ Better use should be made of Volunteer Bureaux and Community Service Volunteers in advertising opportunities for volunteering

_ Volunteers should have a place on the Hampshire County Council website/Intranet

_ Services can do more to work together; e.g. reminiscence work can be expanded by collaboration between museums, libraries and archives

_ All services should co-operate with Libraries in the production of guidelines for the management of volunteers

_ All services should produce guidance packs for volunteers tailored to their own sections

_ Existing good practice in Libraries should be shared with other services by storing templates and standard forms for introductory material on the Intranet.

_ Other departments such as Adult and Children's Services should be asked to promote the opportunities Recreation and Heritage can offer

_ Data on numbers of volunteers should be collected more rigorously in the expectation that funders in future will be asking for better information

_ Services should seek out ways to show their appreciation of the work of volunteers, perhaps through special events.

Section 100 D - Local Government Act 1972 - background papers

The following documents disclose facts or matters on which this report, or an important part of it, is based and has been relied upon to a material extent in the preparation of this report.

NB the list excludes:

1 Published works.

2 Documents which disclose exempt or confidential information as defined in the Act.

TITLE FILE

None