Volunteering Australia, together with Volunteering WA, are pleased to announce that Volunteering WA will be assuming responsibility for the administration and support of GoVolunteer from 18th June 2012. This comes as a result of the recent decision to relocate the administrative headquarters of Volunteering Australia from Melbourne to Canberra as part of the major restructuring of the national peak body by its Board.
The decision to appoint Volunteering WA with the responsibility for GoVolunteer centralises support for the website and VIKTOR Online (the volunteer management system underpinning the new site) in one place and will ensure a seamless delivery of service for users of both Go Volunteer and VIKTOR Online.
Thank you to Kristin Sinclair from Centre fro Volunteering for this message: "Watched your video this week - amazing collaboration between you and The Centre for Volunteering. Learnt so much despite working in vol sector for past 10 years. A must for anyone working with vols...and no I am not biased despite my awesome colleagues producing this with you :-) well done Martin J Cowling"
I have been excited at initial sales &amazing feedback for my new DVD: Top Tips for Recruiting Volunteers. Thanks everyone.
If you would like to get your hands on a copy, check out: http://bit.ly/ShopPFTS
This The Tomorrow People was a British children's science fiction television series, which ran in the 1970s. "Tomorrow People" were born to human parents but had powers such as telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation.
Tomorrow's People are an English charity whose state they are a " national employment charity that is changing the lives of some of society's most excluded and marginalised people through work."
This week the charity execs have probably been wishing and hoping for some super powers after revelations that "volunteers" were treated badly whilst on the job at the Queen's recent Jubilee celebrations.
Two jobseekers claimed, when interviewed by the Guardian newspaper, that they had to camp under London bridge overnight, to change into their security clothes in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.
John Prescott (Former Deputy Prime Minister) accused the government of presiding over the "development of labour camps" as it emerged that up to 30 jobseekers and 50 people on apprentice wages from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth were involved in this situation.
But in response to the allegations, a spokesperson for the British Prime Minister has said this was a 'one-off' occurrence. Molly Prince, head of the company has said it is the 'nature of event work' but also said: “It was badly handled in the morning and we have apologised. We are not in the business of exploiting free labour.”and Abi Levitt, Director of development services at Tomorrow's People - stated that it was important work experience to help people get jobs. Some Conservative MPs have accused Labour of nit picking and the newspaper The Daily Mail interviewed some volunteers who were happy with what went on at the "labour camp". Then, Tomorrow's People were accused of being a "Tory" (conservative party) front!
My take. First up, I believe we have a blurring here between cheap labour/volunteering/apprentice job scheme. The three tests of volunteering for me are:
Of free will. In this case, the job seekers on this program were given no choice
For the common good. YES and NO. It may have helped people safely enjoy the Queen's Jubilee but I am not sure these job seekers would have seen it as helping the common good.
For no monetary reward. These people were working in order to receive their Job Search Allowance payment. In other words, No work? No payment.
The fact that two of the conditions are not met says to me this is definitely not volunteer work.
The next issue is the treatment of the volunteers by the organisation. Is it acceptable in any way, shape or form for people to be made to sleep under a bridge on a day when thousands of people in London got hypothermia? Clearly not acceptable. No matter what event. What possessed anyone to allow this?
There is a lot of talk about "the cloud" or "cloud computing" these days. What are people talking about?
You are probably already using cloud computing!
"I am???" You say.
Yup. Cloud computing is the concept that you have every piece of your data at your finger tips wherever you are in the world and on whatever device you are using.
Instead of having documents on your computer at work or at home or laptop, the data sits on the internet ("cloud") and you can access the documents at any or all of those machines- usually simultaneously.
While you make changes to a document "on the cloud" on one machine, those changes will show up on any other device that the document is open on. What is really cool, is that you can actually see those changes occurring on every machine simultaneously!
I see three advantages to using Cloud computing:
You can access it anywhere, anytime. You do not need to have a certain computer or drive. Volunteers or employees can access documents anywhere at anytime.
It is protected- your data is backed up on multiple computers across the world and protected from hackers and viruses
You can share data with whoever you choose. Those people can access information and even add to the information:
There are many companies that can create cloud computing opportunities for you but there are already off the shelf cloud based tools you can use now including
Web Mail eg Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo
Google Docs allow you to easily share your office documents with every team member. Anyone can make changes to these documents at the same time. At People First -Total Solutions, we have all of our key team documents on Google docs. it can be really cool in a team meeting to watch everyone correcting a document. This method also means you always have the latest version of a document. If someone makes a mistake, like one of our staff did, when she deleted three columns of data, Google docs tells you who made the change and allows you to roll back
Accounting- we use Xero which allows us to track our finances and accounting anywhere. Team members can jump in and enter their expense claims directly into the data base from anywhere
Cloud computing is a very cool tool more organisations could take advantage of.
Thank you to my fiftieth follower for The Cowling Report -and thank you to all of my followers and readers. We had the highest readership of any one day twice this month: June 5 (FaceBook Privacy notice- wasting your time) and June 19 (National Conference on Volunteering and Service in the USA). The readership on those days
So, I want t o ask some favours:
Please consider becoming a Follower on this Blog
Comment, comment, comment. I love seeing discussion and comments
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My business People First -Total Solutions has grown and developed because of recommendations from people such as yourself. I always appreciate recommendations for our trainings, consulting and DVDs
The merged organisation would be known as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations but with an additional "strapline". It will retain the brands for Volunteering England and Institute for Volunteering Research.
I believe NCVO are a great organisation and a very, very logical merger choice. There will be some things that will go, I suspect. Eventually, Institute for Volunteering Research will be integrated into the wider NCVO Research area. Policy issues around Volunteering will need to compete for space amongst the many good issues NCVO tackle. The voice of managers of volunteers will be less heard. Advocacy for volunteers needs to be considered amongst the backdrop that NCVO focuses on organisational issues. Funding applications for NCVO will need to consider a number of issues including volunteerism. If there is not strong advocacy internally for volunteering, the issue may have less impact than it currently does in the UK.
On the other hand, it could mean that something survives in a bleak economic environment.
I have been predicting for three years now, we will see wholesale consolidation of the Volunteering infrastructure" sector. We have seen:
Volunteer Canada's major funding challenge following the change of government there
the merger of Volunteering Ireland/Volunteer Centres Ireland.
Who is left? Volunteering New Zealand, Civiq - Instituut Vrijwilligers Inzet in Holland, Volunteer 21 Taiwan, Japan Volunteer Center, Takatioff (UAE) and National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) all remain stand alone. Will they remain alone or will they merge to survive?
These mergers show us that volunteer infrastructure development is still not "sexy". We have not sold it well at any level. I wonder if Reimagining Service will help over in the USA. Otherwise, we are going backwards globally and the loss of VE will be felt widely.
Dinner with a great group of National Conference Volunteering and Service in Chicago was a perfect end to this event. By the way, I took my tie off after this photo.
For me, conference was a turning point after what has been a very difficult period. It affirmed, I am making a diference in people's lives.
Thank you to everyone at NCVS 2012 for your encouragement!
Presented my workshop: Volunteer Management Toolkit. It went very very well. 200 people crammed onto every chair - and spot on the floor to hear me outline what needs to be in a Volunteer Manager's Toolkit. It was a lot of fun!
Here I am pictured with John, one of the three Australians at the Conference
