Why Volunteer?
Volunteering can help you in many different ways. Volunteering at UNIFY gives you the opportunity to get involved in different projects that can help build skills for future career progression. If progression is not what you want then do it for fun. You will work on different projects that will stimulate your mind as you engage with different people, learn new skills and possibly do different tasks outside your role.
Three reasons to volunteer with UNIFY
- If you are an officer looking to progress to a manager, this is a good opportunity to recruit members, lead teams and gain experience in motivation, under performance, conflict management and delegations. You will work on real projects you can provide as examples for future interviews.
- For managers looking to progress to the next level, this is a good opportunity to get involved with creating new strategies, reviewing policies, access to senior management, influencing change at both organisation and sector level as well as being responsible for driving and delivering initiatives.
- For those that are not looking at progression, then this will give you freedom to experiment with your creative side, meet new people, develop new skills outside your current roles and have fun in the process.
Benefits of Volunteering
BBetter Network Connection – Through ongoing projects, we have built better relationships. You will work with many key stakeholders internally and externally such as CEO’s (most from the G15), Directors, Managers and Officers to create and drive change – this is the norm when working on initiatives within the subgroups.
LLeadership skills – Influence, driving change, understanding priorities and maintaining motivation are all key qualities of a leader. Most people think leadership is easy, in some case this is when you working in a corporate environment with an existing structure and only focusing on a small area for the business. You might have a small team who are willing to do tasks as they’re paid to listen and do that role. However, what happens when you find yourself leading on a bigger issue in society, trying to influence change at an organisation/sector level and only working with volunteers who might not have the skill sets you require or the time to commit whole-heartedly? That form of leadership is more fluid and not so easy to gain. However, by the end of your term you should have experience that is more valuable on how to handle new situations and take lead with different groups of people. Most importantly, you will get a gauge for how well you can drive projects when it involves taking on additional responsibilities on top of your current role.
EExperimental – The network is a great place to be experimental. Some people have a vision of how they would create change, the network is a great place to test those ideas as you really see whether your ideas will work or not. One thing we learnt is ideas can sometimes fail but you still have to push forward to find another way that you can make it work. How you wish to do that is up to you but through this process, you learn a lot about your own skill sets and about building and making use of the skill sets within the UNIFY community.
VVariety – As a volunteer be expected to be pulled in many different directions. Each direction will lead you to a different project that will require your attention. You will be working with different teams and variety of different initiatives. This makes life a lot more interesting for people that find their roles transactional, repetitive or monotonous. You will definitely have some capacity to learn new skills or develop your latent abilities.
CConfidence – Talking about Race, Equality, Diversity are not easy. As time goes on you will become confident in having these challenging conversations with colleagues and senior management. This will give you the self-belief in times you need to speak up when you have something on your mind and do not agree with certain ideas, views or strategies.
Sign Me Up
If you want to volunteer with us the process is easy, please visit https://unifynetwork.org.uk/volunteer/
