Recruit Volunteers For Your Organisation
PRACTICAL HELP ON OFFER
If you are looking to find volunteers for your Westminster organisation, One Westminster, in partnership with Westminster City Council, can quickly help you find the people you need to assist you.
We can help in various ways:
- Simply send One Westminster details of your volunteering needs and we will make sure that it’s published in the Westminster Connects Volunteers Newsletter, which is published every fortnight and distributed to thousands of Westminster residents keen to support their local community.
Just email us your volunteering opportunities to [email protected] when you have them and we will pass on details of all interested volunteers who respond to the newsletter.
- If you feel that your volunteering opportunities need to be developed or fine-tuned to fit in with your aims and objectives, One Westminster can help you develop these and can promote your volunteering posts to local residents. Simply email us and we’ll do everything we can to help.
- To advertise your volunteering needs, we advise that you check out the Team London volunteering website and the DoIt.Life website. Both these options are free. If you have any queries, simply email us.
Your feedback and ideas are important to us, so please send an email with suggestions as to your ongoing and future needs for support.
JOIN THE VOLUNTEER COORDINATORS’ NETWORK
The Volunteer Coordinators’ Network comes under the banner of the Westminster Community Network that is organised by One Westminster. It meets every three months.
All charity volunteer coordinators or indeed anyone who is responsible for recruiting or managing volunteers as part of their role can join these informative sessions that cover topics such as:
- Best practice: Opportunities to share best practice on how to recruit, manage and retain volunteers, including individuals with higher support needs.
- Signposting: Discussions on cross-signposting and useful dissemination of information to help build capacity.
- A wide range of subjects relating to volunteer management presented by guest speakers.
To join this network, just register your organisation with us by filling in the Registration Form to be invited to meetings (currently held via Zoom). You can check quarterly for the date of the next meeting on the One Westminster Training/Events page or visit the Volunteer Coordinators Network page .
The facilitator for the network is Peshang Arkawaki and you can email her with any queries you have or suggestions of topics for discussion at future network meetings.”
GETTING PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE ON BOARD
If you are setting up a community project that needs volunteers with professional skills, such as digital marketing or accountancy, or you want to run an event that needs help with sponsorship or donations, our employee volunteering team, Time & Talents, can advertise such needs to its corporate partners to help find you volunteers, donations or sponsorship.
We currently publish a bi-monthly newsletter that is sent to our corporate partners and Westminster-based businesses that advertises volunteering opportunities in community projects in fields including education, employment, health and wellbeing.
Businesses plan their corporate support well in advance, so we need to advertise your opportunities as early as possible to give you the best possible chance of securing support.
If you don’t have any plans finalised, we’re happy to help you develop suitable projects and opportunities, just email us.
RECENT SUCCESSES
Around 100 volunteers took part in 20 local projects for charities in the run up to Christmas 2021. An array of activities were organised by One Westminster’s coordinators including tidying up gardens for older people, redecorating charity spaces, games with young people, and many festive events. Highlights included Christmas crafts sessions for day care centres and nursing home residents, and a specially created Zoom Christmas quiz for Blind Aid.
Volunteers also made Christmas cards for older members of the Befriending Plus and Age UK Westminster programmes, and corporate volunteers from Ignite Logistics, NSL services and Zipcar helped to deliver Christmas hampers, spreading the festive spirit to all corners of the borough.
Around £10,800 in-kind was generously donated by a variety of financial, investment, construction companies and government departments to tackle IT poverty and to cover the costs of materials for activities and festive gifts.
Of this sum, nearly £7,000 worth of laptops and mobile phones were donated by CAPCO and given to West End Community Trust, Age UK, One Westminster and its Social Prescribing service. And festive treats costing around £3,000 were donated by global construction company ISG and delivered to Family Lives’ refugees and to Carers Network.
Last but not least, the Dementia Centre received a real six-foot Christmas tree donated by chartered surveyors Rouge-Mont, making the centre coordinator’s and the residents’ Christmas wish come true!
TESTIMONIALS FROM WESTMINSTER CHARITIES
Here’s what some of the charities and companies providing volunteers said about the events and activities they participated in:
A huge thank you for the introduction to ISG. Their volunteers delivered festive gift boxes to Carers Network’s unpaid carers. The carers were delighted to be remembered – thank you for making this possible.”
Annwen Bates, Head of Fundraising and Communications, Carers’ Network
Your generosity and kindness were very much appreciated, the refugee families are not entitled to any benefits and live on £8 a week each, so your gifts meant more than you can imagine 😁. I - and Adel at Family Lives - thank you so much – both the refugee children and their parents loved your gifts.”
Sharon Blake, Early Help Family Practitioner, Westminster Children’s Services
Thank you so much for delivering the hampers for the Befriending Plus project – it is such a huge help and will hopefully put a smile on a quite a few faces.”
Natalie Castro, Befriending Plus Coordinator, One Westminster
We had a fun day today. Thank you for the opportunity to help out in the local community - Merry Christmas!”
Mehdi Ddloune, Locations Manager, Zipcar
The tree is looking great! We hope Neil (from donor company Rouge-Mont) will pop in and see it.”
Joanna Budhu, Dementia Resource Centre Manager
A big thank you for all your support in helping us to get volunteers for our Christmas Project. A difficult situation arose when volunteers that had agreed to attend dropped out due to illness/COVID-19. So your success in finding us volunteers at short notice was invaluable. The team from Ignite Logistics were one of our superstar volunteers!”
Sandy Parianem, Christmas Project Coordinator, Age UK Westminster