Dave Thomas, Volunteering Development Officer at NCVS writes...
Over the very many years that I have been a Leader of Volunteers, the phrase “Volunteer Passport” has faded in and out of fashion. It has resurfaced on the national scene in reports produced before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although I have never been a fan of this concept, I want to explore the positives and negatives of volunteer passports and invite you to let me have your feedback.
What is a volunteer passport?
Like many aspects of volunteering, there is no single definition of a “Volunteer Passport”. The definition on the WCVA website seems to be a useful one:
A passport provides credentials that are verified by one organisation and accepted on trust by another, enabling easier movement from one to the other without the need for duplicating administrative processes.
It can be about verification of volunteer ID, or about DBS status. Or it can be a record of training successfully undertaken, to grant exemption to a volunteer from having to repeat basis topics when they move to a new voluntary position. It can be all of these and more!
It may be simple document kept by the volunteer, or an online confidential profile on a web platform, which can be shared or downloaded as appropriate. More technical options include use of a QR code to access information which is kept securely in cloud-based storage and which is independent of any particular web platform.
In all cases it involves personal information which must be handled in line with data protection principles.
Research published in April 2021 said: "A review of available literature and information on existing volunteer passport initiatives found a great variety of ways in which volunteer passports were approached and used.”
There are two types of passport:
- Volunteer portability
This category of passport is often driven by a desire to standardise volunteers’ training and make movement of volunteers easier across different organisations and roles.
- Validation and valuing
This second category is looking to record volunteers’ experience, knowledge and skills, or to provide rewards to volunteers.
The research found that existing schemes often have elements of both types.
So, a volunteer passport could be a record of training and / or a record of skills. If we try to discover exactly what training is “passported”, or what skills are valued, the research found that there is a great disparity across existing and proposed schemes.
As an example, Derbyshire County Council has a well-established Volunteer Passport scheme whose shared training involves:
- equality, diversity and inclusion
- keeping yourself and others safe
- first aid
- a person centred approach.
Who is affected by volunteer passports?
Volunteers and volunteer-involving organisations are obviously affected but recent publications, such as the research already quoted, have shown that local and national government bodies are involved in this area. It seems that other public sector bodies, many of them in health, are also looking again at passporting.
What are the positives?
Even as a dyed-in-the-wool passport cynic, I can recognise that the idea must have some merit. If they didn’t work for at least some stakeholders, volunteer passports would have disappeared a long time ago.
Volunteer Portability passports offer an advantage for a group of organisations (called a “Federation of Trust” in the research). This term means:
Groups of organisations with some aspects of shared volunteer recruitment and on boarding. In the initiatives explored in this research, organisations in ‘federations of trust’ had either a same local area or sector in common or both. Their collaboration involved a joined-up approach to volunteer recruitment and on boarding which allowed organisations to trust and accept each other’s volunteers or have centralised recruitment and on boarding systems and processes.
Validation and Valuing passports seem to provide a good way to keep track of transferable skills training that the volunteer has completed. However, it seems that transferable skills tend to be generic and at a basic level.
What are the negatives?
For me the biggest negative is that passports are designed and run around the needs of organisations or networks of organisations. Would it be unreasonable for me to interpret passports as a step down a road to turning volunteers into commodities that can be shuffled between organisations? This is the heart of my own opposition to passports.
In Nottingham, we agreed that our Volunteer Strategy process embeds the fundamental principle that the volunteer is at the heart of volunteering.
A rhetorical question
Are we able to prove to volunteers and potential volunteers that we have good policies, practices and procedures in place? Some of us hold the Investing in Volunteers quality standard, but far more of us don’t. Instead of volunteers having a passport to show that they are ready for volunteering, should our organisations have to hold a passport to show we are ready for the volunteer?
