Volunteers are the driving force in the civil sector, and volunteer work and initiatives are of great importance for many organisations in our country.
However, how well is volunteer capital managed? What is volunteering and how harmonious are we in defining and understanding this topic? How much attention should be paid to volunteers in the organisation to achieve better results?
The answers to these and many other questions were received by the civil society organisations at the online volunteering workshop held on the ZOOM platform on March 24 and 26, 2021, organized by the Civic Society Resource Center (CSRC).
“One of the primary goals of this workshop was to “introduce” the participants to the role of volunteer, to remember their personal volunteer experiences, challenges and pleasant feelings that they experienced, because, although most of them are (or were) volunteers themselves, however, coming to the workshop as part of the management of their organisations with the intention to learn how to manage other volunteers. Therefore, it was important for me to temporarily put the volunteer “hat”, to have the feeling of “being in the volunteer’s shoes” while thinking about being “on the other side”. “I think that only in this way we can believe that we will know how to respond to the needs of volunteers and motivate them appropriately to achieve the expected results, so that together (volunteers and the organisation) we can be successful in making positive changes in our communities,” said Dragana – Dina Mitrovic, Project Associate of CSRC from Stip, and also lecturer at this workshop.
The workshop was attended by 17 CSO’s representatives who through presentations and exchange of experiences and ideas during the discussions and practical exercises harmonized the understanding of the basic concepts related to volunteering. They supplemented their knowledge of volunteer capital management, a process that traverses planning, recruitment, training, through monitoring and evaluation, to the “correction” and “firing” of volunteers, with an emphasis on volunteer motivation.
“Considering that our organisation GRIT from Probistip has just been established, the whole workshop fits in well with this beginning. We already have some ideas on how to involve volunteers, but through the training we learned how to do it in an organized and efficient way. In the end, the mentoring support from CSRC was mentioned, which after this workshop we decided to definitely use, “said the organisation GRIT.
During the workshop, the organisations were informed about the legislation, and several examples were shared with guidelines for various documents that participants will be able to adapt and use in their organisations.
“What I could single out and what impressed me was the description of the volunteer position, because it opened new horizons and ideas for the realization of many of the activities planned for 2021. Namely, I cannot but mention the Rulebook on the manner of keeping records of volunteer work, which indicates a transparent and sustainable management of an organisation”, said one of the participants in the workshop.
The conducted workshop is part of the Capacity Building Program of the Civil Society Resource Center, a project funded by the European Union, and implemented by the Macedonian Center for International Cooperation (MCIC) in cooperation with Media Plus from Stip and the Association for Democratic Initiatives, Gostivar.
