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  • Involving people with Lived Experience as Volunteers - Good Practice Guide

    Created: 9/3/2019

    On occasion, organisations are fortunate enough to have service users ask to volunteer with them. This is a well-worn path and one that many organisations rely on for the recruitment of new volunteers. Of course, this has very clear benefits in that those individuals have prior knowledge of your services and also bring an empathy with them, having been in the same position as current service users. Lived experience volunteering can offer so many other benefits too, and involving lived experienced volunteers (LEVs) can prove to be very worthwhile if managed properly.

    However, there are several considerations when recruiting from this pool of people:

    • Does our organisation have a policy/procedure for this?
    • How will you manage risk?
    • How will you put this into practice?
    • Which roles within your organisation will you recruit LEVs for?
    • Will the support you offer LEVs differ to non LEVs?

    If you’d like some help to answer some of these questions (and many more!), then check out our latest publication. This Good Practice Guide addresses all of the issues an organisation faces when recruiting individuals with experience of your area of work as volunteers. This isn’t always as straight forward as the transition from service user to volunteer. This Guide is designed for any organisation that involves volunteers who have direct or indirect experience of your area of work. We have a limited supply of hard copies, so please download and keep this electronic version.

    For more information on this, or to discuss lived experience volunteering in more detail, please contact as at [email protected].



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