Make Your Mark Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit: 6 months on

We launched the Make Your Mark Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit in November 2023 at SCVO’s The Gathering to a lively audience of representatives from 50+ voluntary organisations. 6 months on from the toolkit’s launch, we’re taking stock of our progress so far, as well as opportunities for further refinement.

The Make Your Mark Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit is designed to support voluntary organisations in Scotland to make their volunteering programmes more inclusive. It was informed by focus groups with marginalised people, surveys of voluntary organisations and extensive desk-based research on inclusive volunteering. The toolkit is part of Scotland’s Volunteering Action Plan, and was created in partnership with the University of Strathclyde. It was funded by the Scottish Government and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Since its launch, the toolkit has been downloaded 3,000 times, and promoted across the UK’s voluntary and heritage sectors at 8 events totalling 380 attendees. Feedback from event participants include:

• “It changed the way I thought about involving volunteers, and made me see it as more of an opportunity.”
• “The workshop had an impact because I am now implanting a different approach to volunteering.”
• “The toolkit is invaluable.”
• “The workshop flagged up things I hadn’t even considered so now I can think more about different factors that affect people and are barriers to volunteering.”

Earlier this year, we partnered with Thistles & Dandelions, a project that aims to connect underrepresented women with heritage spaces in Glasgow, to support our members to use and trial the toolkit. 

From this process, several key recommendations for future development of the toolkit were identified:

• Clarify the difference between volunteering, placements, unpaid work and paid employment.
• Provide more information around how to address economic barriers to volunteering, which are becoming more prevalent due to the cost of living crisis.
• Include more information on evaluation / measuring volunteer impact.
• Highlight the resources and training available to empower staff to support volunteers with a range of access needs, specifically around supporting people struggling with their mental health.

Additional recommendations for our wider work to make heritage volunteering more inclusive were also identified:

• Host regular opportunities for peer-to-peer learning around inclusive volunteering.
• Organise facilitated workshops around barriers and enablers for volunteering, as well as how to create bespoke, organisation-specific inclusive volunteering plans.
• Create a lending library for volunteer equipment.

The Make Your Mark Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit was designed as a living document to be updated regularly to remain reflective of best practice. Our partnership with Thistles & Dandelions was just the beginning of this iterative process, and we will  incorporate their feedback into the toolkit and our wider campaign activities. We will also be partnering with the National Inclusion Group to further test the toolkit across a range of voluntary organisations and build on our collective knowledge of inclusive volunteering. Watch this space!

If you have used our toolkit and have any feedback on topics we may have missed, or information or practice that is now outdated, or inclusive volunteer case studies that you’d like to include, please do drop us a line at hello@makeyourmark.scot. By working together to remove barriers and share best practice, we can make volunteering for all.