The importance of volunteering

Wow! Yesterday was amazing. We spent the day in workshops, meeting amazing people, sharing ideas, and learning new skills. I attended the Volunteering and Branch Development workshop along with 40 others. The workshop focused on the factors that influence young people's desire to volunteer and how we can effectively engage young people as volunteers. This was a hugely relevant workshop for me to attend.

We are making great progress in New Zealand Red Cross with youth involvement in governance and with our new youth programmes, but still don't have very many young volunteers, especailly not compared with some of the African countries I've been talking to. In Zimbabwe around 80% of their volunteers are youth. It's amazing the diversity present in Red Cross Red Crescent internationally - I just had no idea!

After hearing about Federation guidelines on volunteering in the morning, we moved into small groups to discuss the key external factors that we think will influence volunteering in the coming years. We decided to focus on one in particular, changing demographics. This is a big one for New Zealand - we are a culturally diverse society already, and will only become more so, as immigration increases and the composition of our society changes. We already have significant Maori, Pasifika and Asian populations in New Zealand and I think key to the growth of Red Cross in New Zealand in the coming years will be the engagement of these diverse groups. We need to reach out and interact with all of society.

Not only do we need to represent cultural diversity in Red Cross in NZ, we need to make sure that we are representative of different age groups in society too. This is a challenge that we are working on with regards to youth - and this workshop has given me plenty of ideas to help improve this.

Later in the afternoon, we but our ideas about volunteering into practice as we played the Branch Development Game. In this game you form small groups and are tasked with creating a branch and developing it from scratch. We have to think carefully and plan how you are going to build up the branch, what programmes you want to focus on and the resources you need in order to do this. This game was definitely an eye opener for me. There is so much planning and thought that needs to go into building upa group from nothing, and you have to be prepared for anything - you never know when disaster is going to strike!

All in all a fantastic day yesterday! I learnt heaps and met some awesome people. I had some great conversations with people from all over the world and it reinforced for me just how much we all have in common!

(Photos from top: James, Canadian Red Cross; Youth volunteers from Dominca Red Cross and Mauritius Red Cross; Our group playing the branch development game; Brie and Aaron with Shafiullah from Afghanistan Red Crescent)