Skills-based volunteering
Utilising and developing employee skills to transform the community
Skilled-volunteer support not only can improve the day-to-day delivery of a community partner but can completely transform their operations and future sustainability.
Our volunteering programmes allow employees to utilise and enhance their existing
skills, experience and sector-specific expertise. Alongside the benefit of delivering these existing skills to new audiences and in new settings, employees can also use our volunteering programmes to develop a multitude of new skills.
A focus on the win-win
Through monitoring the increasing demands on the not-for-profit sector and through regular communication with our community partners and residents on the ground we understand the needs of Islington.
We invest the time with our community partners to delve into their challenges and create clear and detailed briefs to arm every volunteer with the knowledge of how they can help and what the commitment will entail.
We’ll facilitate an introductory call with the volunteers and community partner and are available at the end of the phone for a volunteer every step of the way.
Finally, we ensure that every employee sees learning and development outcomes from their volunteering and have become a Trailblazer partner of the Skills Builder framework to support this.
Our key opportunities
CoRe - Community Resourcing
We analyse the skills of corporate volunteers and create bespoke teams to help community partners overcome significant operational challenges. We have supported projects in the following areas, to name just a few:
Operational diversification and expansion
Governance
Branding and marketing
Financial management
Research, insight, and monitoring and evaluation
Asset management
GDPR
Business planning and fundraising
Strategic Solutions
Corporate volunteers volunteers use their professional expertise to support a community organisation to overcome a particular strategic challenge. This workshop takes places over a half day and is facilitated by the BIG Alliance. By the end of the workshop, volunteers will have created a road map and identified the next steps for the organisation to take.
BoardBuilders
Helping to recruit and place business professionals with the necessary experience and expertise onto community organisation boards.
We run three BoardMatch events each year and can deliver a workshop to your employees on the requirements, benefits and process of becoming a community partner trustee or non-executive director.
Pro bono consultancy
We help employees to funnel their professional skills and sector-specific expertise into the community. Past consultancy has covered:
Legal advice
IT infrastructure
HR, including recruitment and policies
Financial management
Change management
Marketing and communications
Leaders in Partnership Coaching Programme
Matching business managers and leaders with directors and senior staff in the voluntary and not-for-profit sector to help both achieve their goals. Previous partnerships have tackled:
Managing change and transformation
Developing leadership styles
Strategic problem solving
Staff performance and motivation
Business planning and project management
A Toolkit for Islington
Whether it’s career insight videos or tips on how to stay mentally healthy (see right), employees have such an array of knowledge and professional skills which our community partners and their beneficiaries don’t always have access to.
Is there a pre-existing CPD course or a new top tips list you could share to provide a local charity or resident with the tools they need?
What our partners are saying
“The BIG Alliance team was crucial to the success of the session. In the preparation, Tom and the team guided us in the best way to structure the session, based on their experience of hosting similar events. They also helped us select a suitable community partner where we could best leverage our skills and have the most impact, as well as providing important materials to help our volunteers prepare. Finally, during the session itself Tom managed the volunteers and community partner perfectly.”
Macquarie Group lead volunteer
“The number of people who had been engaged by BIG Alliance and ELBA as potential trustees was hugely impressive, but even more so the calibre of people presented to us. We received interest and met with more people than we had places for on our Board; it was a good problem to have when coming to the decision of inviting those to join as Trustees.
Katy Porter, CEO of Manor Gardens Welfare Trust