Home Link - 6 staff and 53 volunteers

Motivating volunteers through portfolio building

Home Link is a befriending service for families with pre-school children in Edinburgh. Frances Young is the manager: 'The nature of befriending means that volunteers work very independently. Once they've completed their initial training, we do have regular supervisions and social events but we wanted to offer volunteers something that would help them develop their skills further.

Frances Young

'Our plan was to help volunteers build their own portfolio, containing information about their achievements and skills. In essence, the idea of a portfolio is to help create a theoretical framework for the volunteer's befriending skills. Volunteers could then use their portfolio as a tool to identify and develop further training or career progression.

'We have now developed a pro-forma so that all our project workers have a resource for helping volunteers to build a portfolio. In practice, the process was really about encouraging volunteers to become confident about their own skills. Because volunteer befrienders often feel that what they do is quite 'ordinary,' we spent a lot of time in the beginning encouraging them to recognise and name their own skills. For example a volunteer who had found out more about a child's medical condition to help the family, dismissed this as 'I just made a few phone calls and got some information.' We encouraged her to see the value of this process and reframe it as research.

'If volunteers don't go through an explicit process of identifying their skills, it's often hard for them to look back and pinpoint what they've gained from volunteering. Portfolio building works on a really individual level, it helps volunteers to realise that they have a lot under their belts already and gets them ready for the next step they want to take, whatever that may be. One of the volunteers from the portfolio course has gone on to get a job, the other is planning to do a Scottish Vocational Qualification.

'I would really recommend portfolio building as a way to motivate and develop volunteers. However, setting this up in the initial stages was very time consuming and a real learning process for us. Like anything, to really do it properly, time to develop this must be built into staff time. We found that it was important to keep the portfolio course focused and on a time limit. We alternated between group and individual meetings on a monthly basis over a period of six months.'

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