People

Our aim: To have well-trained, supported and motivated adult volunteers from all backgrounds, and to increase the number of young people from diverse backgrounds.

It’s so important that every volunteer has a wonderful experience at Scouts. If they enjoy volunteering with us, we’ll inspire them to keep supporting our young people to gain skills for life.

As well as appreciating the amazing work of our current volunteers, we want to welcome new volunteers. With more volunteers to deliver our programmes, we can give even more young people the chance to enjoy Scouts.

Our approach

To start, we’re focusing on:

• Recruiting more volunteers and welcoming new volunteers more warmly from the start. We’ll make sure our teams and our way of volunteering fits with the time people want to give, and we have people with the right skills and support. We’ll also make our processes more accessible by creating up to date recruitment and appointment tools.
• Making volunteering a positive experience, every day. To do this, volunteers are leading the redesign of future volunteers’ experience, using a new co-led team approach.
• Creating more engaging learning for volunteers and supporting volunteers to develop their skills when and where they need to.
• Building the digital tools to enable all the above. This means developing a new fit-for-purpose membership system and a convenient way for members to learn. Both of these will be easy to use and accessible through scouts.org.uk.

To achieve this, we’re co-creating our work with volunteers every step of the way. So far, over 6,500 people have helped design, create, and test our new tools and support, making sure they work for everyone.

Progress a year on

Over the last year, so much has happened to turn the designs we shared at our senior volunteer get-together, (Basecamp 22, back in May 2022 in Manchester), into real change. This event kicked off our volunteering changes with senior volunteers from all over the UK. We’ll start rolling out the first of these changes locally this year.

Some key successes:

• We had fantastic interaction and feedback at Basecamp 22. The sessions we ran introduced new changes to our key leadership roles. Together, we started shaping the support local volunteers need to make upcoming changes work for them.
• Most Counties/Areas/Regions (Scotland) have recruited volunteer Transformation Leads and their teams. They’re already playing a crucial role in helping produce local plans, and they’re leading the roll out of our new volunteer experience.
• We're working closely with trusted technology partners, Kerv Digital and imc, to design and build user friendly digital tools. Together, we’re making good progress on both our learning and our membership systems.
• We have a collaborative partnership with Girlguiding thanks to the generous support from Pears Foundation. Together, we’re working on our recruitment tools and approach to welcoming new volunteers, so we can solve shared challenges and learn from each other.
• Volunteers and staff are working closely to co-design our core learning strategy. They’re creating new tools for our welcome process and developing the guidance and support our volunteers need to make this new way of working practical and helpful. This includes our new team descriptions, which explain how we’ll volunteer under the new approach.
• Changes to our culture launched in May 2023. This focuses on our new approach to volunteering in teams, what we call ourselves, and how we use our volunteering culture statement to help set the right expectations.

What’s next

• Our Digital Skills tool launches in summer 2023. This’ll allow volunteers to assess their own digital skills and directs them to the appropriate resources they’ll need to update and improve their digital skillset.
• We’ll keep supporting our volunteers as they build teams to deliver changes locally and create bespoke local plans to put the new approach in place.
• We’ll test our new tools and systems with our volunteers in summer 2023 to make sure they meet everyone’s needs and work well together.
• From November 2023, we’ll work with a small group of early adopter Counties/Areas/Regions (Scotland) to help them make changes to their area. We’re planning this as a test, and we’ll monitor any teething problems along the way. By doing this, we can learn and improve before these changes are shared with everyone.
• In February 2024, our new approach, with its cultural changes and new tools for learning and membership, will officially begin for everyone. For several months afterwards, we’ll support teams where they need it. We’ll constantly ask for feedback to help us improve this initiative.
• Beyond February 2024, we’ll look ahead for other areas we can improve to make our ongoing volunteer experience as positive as possible.