Our Most Valuable Assets

As a fledging club, we may be running before we can walk (or swim and cycle in my case!), but we have joined a programme being supported and directed by Bolsover Community Sports Network and funded by the Community Sports Fund and called the ‘Bolsover Sports Crew’. This programme hopes to support volunteering in local clubs as well as helping those same clubs to welcome and support young volunteers.

I am a passionate believer in the premise that we should look after our volunteers. They are the most valuable asset we have and often overlooked. If we calculate in monetary terms the amount of hours volunteers put in to sport over the year in each club at minimum it will probably be over £20,000 a year and in some of the big clubs it will be over a £100,000. And yet, we often leave this very valuable group of people to ad hoc management – something we would never do when we are thinking about managing the participants and their activities.

Back to the volunteer programme, the small group of clubs involved have just started training to become even more volunteer focused by attending the ‘Role of the Volunteer Coordinator’ and we are now thinking about producing a small action plan which will guide each of us (the clubs) in how we will improve the management of the our volunteers and how we will become more welcoming of a young volunteer who will hopefully be sent on ‘placement’ later this year when we are ready to accept them.

post by Kay Adkins