Volunteering
We are thrilled to to be running a major new partnership between the reading agency and v, (the national youth volunteering charity) and John Laing Integrated Services. v and John Laing have both agreed to fund a pilot Summer Reading Challenge volunteering programme for 16 to 25 year olds during 2010 with 20 partner library authorities. Our vision is to encourage all library services to offer youth volunteering through the Challenge by 2012.
We have now sent out a Volunteering Handbook to all English library services and run subsidised training(free to partner authorities). v has created a recruitment campaign on their VInspired website (which gets 40,000 to 60,000 hits a month) to recruit young people for the Challenge. Young people's involvement will be recognised through the V50 recognition scheme.
This project is designed to be compatible with (rather than replacing) any existing youth volunteering arrangements you already have in place. v expects all 16 to 25 volunteers to be CRB checked. Your service will only have to pay the admin charge on CRB checks for young people (approx £10 per young volunteer) and we expect local monitoring requirements to be minimal as young people will document the experience themselves on the VInspired blog.
Volunteering for under 16s
Several authorities already involve under 16s in Challenge volunteering. You can use the guidance pack that we'll be sending out with this age group. However, for child protection reasons, the main v-Inspired website is open to 16 to 25s only. From April, v will be launching a new safer schools-based volunteer recruitment site for 14 to 15 year-olds. We are in discussions with v about how libraries can be involved with this, probably through SLSs. We will provide further guidance in the spring.
Background
Evidence from our young people's programmes shows that youth volunteering leads to increased skills, confidence and employment. Volunteers and 'buddies' already provide invaluable support to the Challenge in many authorities, enriching the offer to children and creating capacity for additional events and activities. Involving young volunteers has a positive impact on younger children's attitudes to reading. In 2009, 55 library services engaged volunteers to support the Challenge, over 500 of which were aged 16 to 25. Local authority requirements to provide volunteer experiences give you the opportunity to demonstrate your contribution to National Indicator 6. Volunteering is also a key element of the national Library Offer for young people.
MLA will be running generic volunteer seminars about community volunteering for the 2012 Olympics over the summer, which will complement the training and development of Challenge volunteering. Training for the Challenge project will take place in February/March.
Further news about the Summer Reading Challenge is that the final report from the summer 2009 impact study has recently become available, and the team will be writing to you again soon to flag up some exciting findings and recommendations.