Best practice guidelines review

Volunteering New Zealand is leading a review of volunteer best practice guidelines.

Why?

• Organisations need effective tools and support to manage volunteers
• Guidelines need to meet diverse needs and be inclusive
• Volunteering is changing, demanding a change of approach.

The Best Practice Guidelines are one of Volunteering New Zealand initiatives to support and develop managers and coordinators of volunteers in New Zealand. They build on the work completed during the development of the  Competencies For Volunteer Managers  and Best Practice Toolkit .

This suite of tools were developed by Volunteering New Zealand and the sector with extensive consultation and input between 2010-2015.  We are conducting a review from an inclusion and accessibility lens.

What we are doing

We have reviewed how well the Best Practice Guidelines meet current needs and identified gaps that a refresh of the BPGs should address. See a summary of the review.

Volunteering New Zealand has run a co-design process to help devise new volunteer guidelines. Seven online sessions with a total of 65 people have been held in February and March. Participants have self-selected from a wide range of community organisations.

Each session has focussed on contributing best practices for one of the seven proposed areas of the volunteer life-cycle, from recruiting, to exiting volunteers and all the steps in between. Volunteering New Zealand is now synthesizing the ideas to result in a framework of: what volunteers need, what good looks like, actions organisations can take, and resources. The framework will be peer reviewed and tested.

Our goal is for simplified, accessible, inclusive tools and resources to support good volunteer involvement, meeting people where they are at.