Are you holding an event or activity that requires a few extra hands on deck? Recruiting volunteer help for your initiatives can be cost-effective and a good way to involve others from your community.
Practical tips and resources to help you recruit casual volunteers to help support any activities, events and projects that you may be running.
Before you start recruiting a team of volunteers, you’ll need to have a good idea of how you would like to use them. Consider the following questions when planning.
Before you embark on recruiting, training and managing your own volunteers, think about whether another organisation that has trained volunteers could help to support your activity.
Police and Community Youth Clubs (PCYC) in each State:
You can also use resources from Volunteering Australia that can help you to screen and recruit volunteers.
When working with volunteers, please remember to:
If your volunteers have a good experience working with you, they may want to help support your projects in the future or to help spread awareness of your activities to recruit more volunteers. This will help to make sure your initiatives are always filled with people willing to help.
Now that you have a group of volunteers, and you know what you need them to do, you’ll need to undertake a briefing or training session. These sessions will depend on the tasks required.
You could invite an external organisation who has experience in community volunteering to come and train people in your area.
If you decide to train your own volunteers, rather than using volunteers supplied from another organisation, you can use the list of training resources below:
Think about recognising your volunteers over National Volunteer Week to help with retention and making them feel valued and engaged with your program.
You’ve recruited and trained your volunteers. Now your event or activity is coming up, you’ll need to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Below are some suggestions of how you can brief your volunteers to make sure you achieve success.
Volunteering Australia recommends adapting volunteering roles to minimise or remove face-to-face contact to reduce the risk of infection of COVID-19. Read the article to see how you can adapt your activities and keep your volunteers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many Community Drug Action Teams (based in NSW) are looking for new members for ongoing volunteering opportunities. Community Drug Action Teams are committed to reducing alcohol and other drug harms in their community. You can find out more about joining a CDAT here.