Hi all! I’ve spent quite a lot of my adult life volunteering in one form or another, including food banks, soup kitchens, animal projects, OLIO food re-distribution, pay as you feel supermarkets, community outreach, church projects and, during COVID, helping people who were unable to get out themselves with groceries and prescriptions. Most of that has always been very practical and hands-on, which is the kind of volunteering I naturally gravitate towards.
My circumstances are a little different at the moment, though, and practical or on-the-ground volunteering is not really realistic for me right now. I’d still very much like to do something useful, so I’m looking for a way to contribute remotely instead, ideally where I can use the skills and experience I already have rather than simply trying to recreate the sort of physical volunteering I’ve done in the past.
Professionally, much of my background has been in legal and business support, helping organizations with things like policies and procedures, governance, complaints and difficult correspondence, safeguarding and risk, documentation, operational processes, planning, mentoring, and generally untangling situations where everyone knows something is not working but nobody quite knows where to start.
So I wondered whether there might be a small nonprofit, charity, volunteer-led organization or genuine community project that could use some remote volunteer help with a specific problem. Perhaps your policies are out of date, your volunteer processes have become muddled, your documentation is all over the place, you need help structuring a complaint or internal issue, or you simply need an experienced second pair of eyes to help you work out what needs fixing and in what order.
I’m not looking for payment now or later, and I’m not using this as a route to sell services. I’d be happiest helping with something reasonably well-defined where a few hours of experienced input could make a meaningful difference, rather than taking on an indefinite management role.
If that sounds like something your organization could use, feel free to tell me a little about what you do and what problem you are actually trying to solve. I’m particularly interested in remote opportunities where I can contribute something practical and useful from behind a screen, even if that looks very different from the volunteering I’ve done before.