103 Working in the voluntary sector

General

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• Week one introduction Getting started – working in a voluntary organization Book

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  Welcome to the first week of Working in the voluntary sector. This course explores the roles and activities that people carry out within voluntary organizations, either as paid staff or as volunteers. The term ‘working’ in the course title refers to both paid and unpaid work, which, after all, can be equally classed as ‘work’.
  

  What is your role? If you work in an organization, what is your role within that? If you don’t, what is your role in your family, your community or society? What are the roles of different types of organization within the voluntary sector? The concept of role is key to understanding organizations.

  Many of the topics covered in this course are issues or activities that are relevant to other areas of life beyond a job or formal volunteering. You may have attended a public meeting and asked a question, or had an opinion afterwards about how the meeting was run. If you are a patient or a carer, you may have experienced different support groups, or been asked your opinion on local voluntary organizations offering services. So, you may find you have a wealth of experience you can draw on. You’ll begin by looking at the idea of a ‘role’.

  If you are not currently working or volunteering, we suggest you start thinking about an organization you are interested in so that you can use it as an example for the activities throughout the course.

  Start by watching this video, in which the course author Julie Charlesworth introduces you to Week 1.

    

  JULIE: 
  

  Welcome to Week 1 of this badged course from OpenLearn. This first week takes you as the starting point and focuses on helping you to understand the nature of your role within your organization, whether that’s as a volunteer or a paid member of staff. You’ll explore what’s meant by role, such as the job you do, as well as the part you play in different situations and with different colleagues. You’ll also reflect on what your job entails and you’ll also consider how your organization fits within the bigger picture of the voluntary sector. 

  
  

  By the end of this week, you should be able to:

  • describe the different ways of understanding what is meant by ‘role’
  • understand what roles you play
  • explain influences on roles
  • describe the roles and functions of voluntary organizations and locate your organization within this description.

  Another free course on OpenLearn, Introducing the voluntary sector, provides an overview of the sector. If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to study this first if you feel that your knowledge of the voluntary sector is limited.

  Before you start, The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations of the course. Your input will help to further improve the online learning experience. If you’d like to help, and if you haven’t done so already, please fill in this optional survey .

• 1 Jobs, tasks and roles Workshop

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  Thinking about different roles can be challenging: you might work or volunteer with several organisations or groups – each with different ways of doing things and expectations of staff and volunteers. In one organisation you might be ‘part of the team’, but in another you might be expected to work alone. In other areas of life you might have different responsibilities: as a parent, carer or good neighbour. Roles are about expectations – people’s own expectations about their roles as well as what they expect from others and what others expect of them.
  

  This might sound complicated, so it is best to build it up in stages. You will start by looking at the tasks and activities you do in a job, as a volunteer or in other roles or positions. ‘Task’ is a word used in organisations, and particularly by managers, to sort out what people do. In the workplace or when volunteering, people are usually given a list of their tasks in the form of a job description. 

  Activity 1 What work do you do?

  Allow approximately 5 minutes

  As a starting point, write down everything you did in a recent activity. This could be something you completed at work, while volunteering or spending time with your family, or in your community or other position. For each task, note down roughly how much time you spent on this (either actual time in hours or as a percentage of the day).

  You will return to this list in Activity 2.

  Here is a list of tasks carried out by a garden volunteer.

  Table 1 
  Garden volunteering tasks and time spent on them

  Activity/task	Time spent
  Pruned trees and shrubs	2 hours
  Weeding, digging	2 hours
  General chatting with staff/tea break	10 minutes
  Talked to colleague about some gardens research	20 minutes
  Arranged and led a planning meeting about forthcoming garden open day	45 minutes
  Helped move some boxes	10 minutes
  Talked to passers-by about the front garden	10 minutes
  Listened to a fellow volunteer’s concerns about the new expenses system	30 minutes
  Measured up space for a new shed	10 minutes

  
  Reveal comment

  You may have found from doing this activity that it is sometimes difficult to explain what your job actually is. You may have so many different responsibilities that it is impossible to sum up your job succinctly; for example, the list of activities you undertake may often go beyond your job description. 

  From this example, you can see that the volunteer does more than just straightforward gardening tasks. Although he was recruited to do garden maintenance (and this is what the volunteer job description specifies), he has also been involved in open days, events for donors and research on the local area. He has been asked to do these other activities because of his wider interests and experience. Other things he does because he has been asked by the staff, he has identified a need or he wants to help address other people’s concerns. Like many people, he enjoys variety in his work or volunteering. Volunteers often have experience from other jobs that they like to draw on and that go beyond their formal job description.