Online Volunteer Training Bank

Apologies if this is a bit too sector specific - but I've just set up an Online Volunteer Training Bank for museums to use to develop in-house training for their volunteers (info below). Obviously the sessions were designed specifically for museums, but there might besome stuff there that's useful for other volunteer involving organisations.

There are woekshops on Disabilty Awareness, Child Protection, and Customer Care, which are a bit more generic.

You can have a look here:

http://www.mlalondo n.org.uk/ renaissance/ index.cfm? NavigationID= 450

Background about the Bank and my project:

The London Museums Hub Volunteer Management Project is working to
support museums across London with volunteer involvement. One of the
needs that was identified by the Hub was the provision of basic training
for volunteers in museums. The project has successfully provided a
programme of free training for volunteers and the training materials
developed are now available to download here for museums who want to run
their own in-house training. A training needs analysis was conducted to
assess the types of training museums felt their volunteers needed. From
this a range of key topics emerged. Trainers who were experts in their
field and had experience of training and working with volunteers were
then commissioned to develop the training.

Each session lasts for half a day and is designed to raise awareness and
improve people's skills and knowledge in key areas. The sessions are
designed to be as participative as possible and to meet the needs of
people with a range of different learning styles. All the workshops
have been run for museum volunteers in London, and received very
positive feedback.

Each workshop has a 'Training Plan'; the Plan is an outline of the half
day workshop, it contains:

* A list of exercises
* An explanation of the training outcomes for each exercise
* Timings for each exercise

In addition each workshop has materials for the exercises, handouts, and
an accompanying presentation.

There are a number of ways the Training Plan and accompanying materials
can be used. The workshops can be delivered as half day sessions for
your volunteers, or individual exercises can be used for shorter
training sessions. The information can also be adapted for your
volunteer newsletter, or the Training Plan can be used as a starting
point to develop your own session.