Workshop hosted for local helpers

LOCAL volunteers have had their say on a national strategy designed to guide the future of participating in groups, organisations, and services.

Led by Volunteering Australia, the project is taking place across the country with various workshops to discuss barriers, opportunities and challenges following COVID-19 restrictions.

National strategy director Sarah Wilson said the aim is to create a vision of what volunteering will look like in 10 years’ time.

She also said research from several universities provided volunteering was “decimated by COVID, and it’s slowly recovering but not to pre-COVID rate.”

“We need to consider what volunteering might look in the future, especially in the regions where there might be an older population, what it means if they can’t or don’t want to return to volunteering for health reasons,” she said.

Manager of the Bendigo Volunteer Resource Centre, Helen Yorston, said numbers had been dropping even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

She said many people are calling on more flexibility, a variety of roles and support with technology and inductions.

“Volunteering programs need to be adaptable and to cater for the needs of volunteers,” she said. “We’ve got new residents, some being people who’ve retired, or of course newly arrived migrants.

“We hope it is easier for people to participate. We’ve got to keep everyone safe, [but] the processes, the red tape and, making sure we’ve got insurance in place is a real challenge.”

Ms Wilson said not only did the COVID-19 pandemic affect numbers of volunteers, but it showed how important volunteers are in social organisations as well as health services.

“Volunteering is something that’s happening every single day and it always was,” she said. “But what we saw over the past couple of years is the increase in demand for a lot of services went up and the available pool of volunteers wasn’t the same.”