Thing 22: Volunteering to get experience

Volunteering is a hot political potato at the moment.The Big Society, community-run libraries/volunteer-run libraries etc are high on the agenda in terms of public libraries.  I have worked with volunteers in a library where their time, input and skills were invaluable.

In an earlier post I talked about working in a hospice. Hospices do lot of fundraising in order to be able to deliver their important services and quite rightly the money is directed to core services for patients but there are many other important services that rely on volunteers to keep them going - they might be peripheral to the core but they are still important services for those that use them.  At the hospice I worked in we had volunteer drivers to transport patients/families, there were gardeners, flower arrangers, people to read to patients etc as well as offer admin support in the office areas. Without these volunteers the hospice would not have been such a vibrant, caring, well run and resourced place. The library also benefited from a bunch of cracking dedicated volunteers - between them they sorted out the loans, shelved books, requested inter-library loan material, checked in periodicals.... Having a small team of volunteers (1 for a couple of hours a day) meant the two professional librarians were able to do skills training, put together search strategies, answer enquiries... and still maintain their sanity.  The volunteers had not replaced a full time post - there had never been anymore to employ to more than the two professionals and yet as alwyas the professional roles had expanded to a point where they needed help with some tasks. There are many issues surrounding the use of volunteers in libraries and I'm finding some of the current proposals to use volunteers to save money on full-time staff difficult to support. I think the ideal is that public services (and I'm including hospices here) are properly funded but we all know that money doesn't grow on trees.  The volunteers I used to work with really enjoyed their roles but they liked to know that there was someone else there to show them how to do things/take the bulk of the responsibility etc. Volunteers are an excellent addition to a workplace but I think they need to be working in tandem with full time professional staff and surely that gives everyone the best of both worlds.