Volunteering Qld

Pathways for Better Access

Developing volunteer teams that include people from different cultural backgrounds is a highly effective way of ensuring diversity amongst the volunteers who participate in your organisation. With diversity comes a rich array of talents, skills, life experiences and even availability.

Developing an effective volunteer program that engages volunteers from different backgrounds can be challenging. It requires the flexibility to embrace diverse skills and life experiences. Systems or operational enhancements are easy on paper, but may not translate well in practice. Managing and leading volunteer teams is difficult at the best of times, but with team members from diverse backgrounds it can seem even harder.

Best practice offers the best insight

Sometimes the best way of learning how to enhance your volunteer program, is seeing how others have done it. Find out what these best practice organisations have to say.

Cross-organisation network

The pathways network is a cross-organisation forum where practitioners can share challenges and ideas, and identify opportunities for collaboration. This network meets four times a year and is open any organisation keen to enhance their capacity to engage volunteers from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Pathways blog

Talking about challenges and ideas is one of the best ways to find the right pathway for your organisation. Follow the dialogue and tell us what you think via the pathways blog.

Resources

An excellent collection of fact sheets, papers and links exploring best practice opportunities to engage volunteers from culturally diverse backgrounds.

Just a few of the best from this collection include:

• Learn more about getting people from diverse cultural backgrounds involved in volunteering: Involving volunteers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds - Take a closer look
• Educating others about the value of diversity within volunteering communities: Diversity and volunteering go hand in hand
• Manual to help trainers customise training for volunteer managers and coordinators: Recruiting and supporting volunteers from diverse cultural and language backgrounds

Short and sweet tipsheets developed in 2011 by Volunteering Tasmania and the University of Hobart as part of a joint venture to explore culturally and linguistically diverse volunteering.

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