A report on pilot youth team volunteering projects run by Volunteer Centre Edinburgh with the support from the Scottish Executive's contribution to the Laidlaw Youth Project.

Three Teams, Three Outcomes, Many Lessons Learned

At the start of 2004 VCE commissioned research among young people in Edinburgh on their attitudes, desires and perceived barriers to volunteering. The resulting report “Sorry I don’t do charity” highlighted a number of factors which would encourage younger people to volunteer. One of the key conclusions was that young people were more likely to take up volunteering if they were doing it with their friends – in teams.

VCE has a long history of undertaking team volunteering in the context of employee volunteering, but up to that point we had not organised events foryounger or “unrelated” groups.

Sourcing funding from the Laidlaw Youth Project we embarked on a pilot of three different team volunteering models for young people. We worked in different ways and with different groups of young people and we learned an awful lot along the way. The purpose of this web-resource is to encourage others to embark on team volunteering for young people. In it we’ll be honest about what mistakes were made and what the successes were. As well as details of each project, there are video clips of the people involved talking about their projects, tips on what works well and checklists to make sure you have everything covered when organising your first event.

1. Introduction
2. Team 1 - Power of 5
3. Team 2 - Streetwise
4. Team 3 - Green Fingers
5. What we Learned
6. Tools / Resources for Team Events