As we gear up for our extraordinary Volunteer Coordinators Network event, SupportNet, we’re delighted to feature a blog produced for us by one of our keynote speakers, Rob Jackson. Rob is one of the world’s leading authorities on volunteering, with over 30 years experience working in the voluntary and community sector, holding a variety of strategic development and senior management roles that have focused on leading and engaging volunteers. In this blog, he focuses on the challenge of increasing volunteer diversity. He writes:

We rightly want to open up our organisations to under-represented groups

Certain groups of people are under-represented in formal volunteering. We all know that right?

Quite rightly we are often called to open up our organisations to these under-represented groups. We are challenged to broaden the diversity of our volunteer teams and to tackle any practical barriers to the engagement of a wide pool of volunteers.

This is a good thing. We should strive for it in our volunteer teams. But I worry that by focusing on under-represented groups we may be disregarding the great volunteer work people in these groups already do.

Just because someone doesn’t volunteer for us, doesn’t mean they aren’t volunteering, often in more informal and non-traditional ways.

Are we unintentionally labelling people?

Perhaps without realising it, when we label people as under-represented we effectively say to them: “The volunteering you already do isn’t valid, so come and do what we want you to do instead.”

This leads to an important mindset shift. These groups of people aren’t under-represented, they are historically marginalised and excluded by our organisations.

So yes, let’s see what we can do to remove the very real barriers to making volunteering more equal, diverse and inclusive.

Are there more systemic, institutional and cultural barriers?

But let’s also take a moment to reflect and see if there are more systemic, institutional and cultural barriers around volunteering in our organisations.

They are perhaps the barriers we need to challenge first.

Join us for SupportNet

To find out more about our exciting SupportNet event on 10 October at Thirsk Racecourse, and book your place, visit our event webpage.