The Health and Wellbeing team within Volunteer Edinburgh has been delivered for 35 years and has supported people who experience the greatest health inequalities to become active volunteers in their community.
Almost instantly in March 2020, volunteering stopped for most people engaged with our Health and Wellbeing Team. Our team’s efforts focussed on supporting all clients, whether they were able to continue volunteering or not. Throughout the period of lockdown and during the months that followed, our Health and Wellbeing staff provided responsive and ongoing welfare support to current and historic caseloads, whilst supporting volunteer involving organisations (VIOs).
Along with most of the population, our clients were at home without occupation, purpose, or normal connections. For fragile and complex individuals with limited resilience and poor social networks, this experience was tougher.
The priority for Volunteer Involving Organisations (VIOs) is to get services back up and running. Capacity and resources for volunteers who need support is harder to identify. VIOs are exhausted and for many, goodwill has been stretched.
Recent Scottish Government research* reports that “inclusion in volunteering” is a priority for 37% of organisations, compared to 79% of Third Sector Interfaces (TSIs).
As a team that has championed inclusion in volunteering for over 30 years, we are painfully aware that inequalities in volunteering have massively widened recently. Find out more about what our team have been up to via the downloadable resources available in the sidebar (below on mobile).
* Scottish Government: Survey on role of volunteering and the third sector response to COVID-19 – preliminary results June 2021
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