Volunteering Australia’s new National Standards for Volunteer Involvement were launched on Monday 11 May 2015 to mark the beginning of National Volunteer Week 2015 (11-17 May). The new Standards incorporate significant changes to the original standards in order to reflect best practice in volunteer management in Australia’s current work environment.

The Standards provide a sound framework for supporting the volunteer sector in Australia. The Standards are much easier to follow and are adaptable to different organisation types and different forms of volunteering which reflect the diversity of this growing sector.

Direct benefits to organisations:

• They provide good practice guidance and benchmarks to help organisations attract, manage and retain volunteers, and
• Help manage risk and safety in their work with volunteers.

Direct benefits to volunteers:

• They help improve the volunteer experience.

The new National Standards for Volunteer Involvement are available here for free download.

Guidance on applying the Standards will be provided via comprehensive implementation resources.

Additionally, Volunteering Australia will be developing a flexible, tiered voluntary certification, or ‘Quality Mark’ system to enable organisations to check how they are tracking in implementing the Standards.

Process

The development of the new Standards has been an inclusive project led by the CEOs of Volunteering S&NT, Volunteering Tasmania and Volunteering WA. Following the establishment of this working group, and a sector wide reference group comprising representatives from all states and territories, a draft document was prepared and presented to the sector for feedback via a survey and series of consultations across Australia.

From that process a set of revised Standards was created that were easier to understand and use, contained clear criteria and relevant content, and had wide applicability to different types of organisations and volunteer situations.

History

The first Australian National Standards were developed for Volunteering Australia by Volunteering Victoria in 1996. Sector consultation took place in 1996 and 1997 and the Standards were formally adopted in February 1998.

Following that time Volunteering Australia actively sought feedback on the functionality of the first set of Standards and as a result of feedback Volunteering Australia developed a new second set of standards that truly embraced the full diversity of volunteer-involving organisations and of volunteering.

This second set of standards was launched in 2001, the International Year of Volunteers, and remained in use until today.

Find out more information here.