Phil Baker investigates the advantages of volunteering
 illustrations: getty images |
I don’t know about you but when someone suggests charitable volunteer work an image of a rather doughty, tweedy spinster carefully arranging the church flowers springs to mind - usually played by Joyce Grenfell or Margaret Rutherford in old Ealing films. Stern and lonely souls who sacrifice their free time for the greater good of their fellow man and who presumably ensure a better lot in the hereafter.
Alternatively I get a mental picture of an earnest and mousy man sitting at a desk somewhere near the back of a stationery cupboard. Invisible and ignored he toils, licking stamps for the Christmas card mail-out.
Happily these clichés are as much part of the past as the films that portrayed them. Increasingly HIV positive people and organisations that represent them are recognising the personal and professional benefits that volunteering offers them.
HIV has an exemplary history of attracting and managing volunteers, from the early days of buddying onwards. It is hardly surprising then that the HIV sector leads in the innovations and progress that have been made in volunteer management and development over the past few years. Every kind of experience from short-term, task-oriented work to structured, year-long programmes designed as carefully as a college course are available. Any volunteering, even if it starts with an evening’s bucket-shaking with the fundraising team, should be considered as a form of unpaid apprenticeship, leaving you with better experience and skills than when you started.
Many also benefit from the boosted sense of self-confidence that volunteering can offer. It is a great testing ground prior to looking for your first position back in the workforce, during which you can find your own answers to questions like: How will I fit in? What will I talk about? What do I wear? How will I manage my adherence now I am out of the home?
Aside from the sense of kharmic well-being from giving of yourself for the benefit of others, volunteering now offers a great variety of tangible, commercial and professional benefits to both volunteers and the organisations that avail themselves of them.
People living with HIV are presented with a variety of challenges and opportunities.
They stop work through illness and are looking for productive ways back into
the work environment.
Many immigrants new to the UK are still not legally able to work in the UK, regardless of their experience. Some have children or other caring obligations that make a full-time job impossible. Many are uncertain about their long-term health and fitness, and are anxious about committing to a regular 9-to-5 in case they fall ill or are affected by treatment side effects.
For whatever reason, it is clear that the positive community represents a great, untapped resource of experience that many employers and organisations can benefit profitably from if they are prepared to offer the flexibility and support needed.
Andrew Little is Director of the Positive Futures Partnership, which helps develop the potential of people living with HIV through education, work and skilling. He emphasises that both organisations and individuals should enjoy a solid, even contractual understanding before starting.
Key to this is the setting of objectives. You should be very clear exactly what you want to get out of the experience before you start. Ask yourself, what do I want this to lead to? What if anything to I want to move on to afterwards? Even if you have no great career planned - if, for instance you are of retiring age - you can still have concrete goals in terms of skills learned and experience gathered. Those little old ladies may not be doing it for entirely selfless reasons.
Developing a long-term plan should be the start point. Along the way you should gain experience, a better CV and even qualification. The advantage of volunteering is that if the experience turns out not to be beneficial for you or what you were looking for, you can always stop and look for something else without damaging your CV or work record.
Materially, volunteering can help you in other areas of life as well. While you receive no pay for the work that you do, your travel expenses such as a travel pass and any expenses that you incur should be paid for by the organisation (this often includes lunch), and you should be given all the resources that you need to complete the work that you have to do.
Here is a rule-of-thumb list of what you should expect:
Volunteering can also offer social benefits. Isolation and loneliness is a characteristic of HIV. It affects Africans and gay men equally, and can be compounded by living in urban areas. Working at an organisation sympathetic and appreciative of your skills can change your life as you meet other people, share experience and increase your network.
I attended a recent discussion with a group of women who volunteer for Positively Women. Many cited their volunteer work as the most satisfying and enjoyable part of their week.
“It keeps my skills alive,” said one woman waiting for a work permit. “It feeds my brain,” said another. All experienced the same WOW! high when they walked into an organisation where they were daily in contact with hundreds of other positive women like themselves. The antidote to isolation and loneliness, I realised, was as impressive and beneficial as the actual work that they performed.
Volunteering can give you the opportunity to meet others in the same boat as you in an environment where you can share and learn from one another’s experience. Contacts made here often prove vital in assisting you further down the career road where the network of allies you have built up through volunteering can be called on to help you in any number of situations.
And, as Andrew Little adds, the majority of HIV positive people in London are not originally from the area; the opportunity to build professional and work relationships cannot be over-stressed.
Many of the women also cited the discipline that volunteering schedules offer as a positive influence in lives that, in many cases, can be unstructured and open-ended.
“It gives me a timetable to the week,” said one. “It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning,” said another.
All the above sounds terribly philanthropic on the part of employer organisations. This energy and resource devoted to improving volunteers’ job prospects and skills. So what’s in it for them?
Positive people present certain challenges that are often not found in the general population. Flexibility and understanding of medical and psychological needs should be given, but will be rewarded by a much more motivated and better-skilled volunteer force. Employers also need to have an understanding of the more recent problems facing volunteers, particularly in London, who are going through the immigration process. Some may have been waiting for months or years for their Leave to Remain status and have settled into a regular volunteer post, only to be whisked off suddenly to another part of the country.
Andrew Little sees one of the major benefits of taking on an employee with HIV as being the premise that that person is guaranteed to have made a conscious commitment and decision to do it. Employers enjoy the benefits of a highly-motivated and driven member of staff, who pondered what they want to do more than, perhaps, an employee who is working because they have to.
Little continues: “Many employers are taken aback by the energy and motivation of an HIV positive employee. They are grabbing at a second chance of life.”
There is no doubt that people with HIV represent a skill pool that is better educated and more experienced than much of the workforce at large. By being unemployed they fall through standard demographic classifications, even though they are far more likely to be graduates or have managerial experience prior to diagnosis. This applies to both UK natives, and to asylum seekers and immigrants, many of whom have had positions of considerable responsibility in their country of origin.
At the recent Positive Futures press conference held at the Institute of Directors, London Mayor Ken Livingstone said: “Positive people represent a potentially huge pool of talent that is being wasted in the capital.” He commended Positive Futures for their work to redress this.
Employers are beginning to take notice as the skills shortage in UK companies exposes a need for motivated and experienced people to help their organisations achieve their potential.
Maybe now is the time to pick up the phone and see how you could benefit from being part of an organisation that values you....
ResourcesPositive Futures Partnership: pfenquiries@ukcoalition.org. Website: www.positive-futures.org General information and help with volunteering, as well as a list or training
opportunities available to volunteers, can be obtained from the London Voluntary
Service Council. Tel 020 7700 8107, email lvsc@lvsc.org.uk or see http://www.actionlink.org.uk/lvsc |
