CEO Reflections | VolConnect Launch

VolConnect’s launch event speakers -

Kashif Bouns – General Manager of the Western Bulldogs Community Foundation, Katie Hall - Member for Footscray, Thu-Trang Tran - CEO Volunteer West

I want to take this opportunity to share my reflection with you about the Connect in VolConnect – I start this reflection all the way back 60,000 years ago. 

I had a chance to personally reflect on the tremendous effort required to stay connected to place and culture when I spent 2 years in Vietnam just before my time with Volunteer West.  

Having been born in Vietnam and growing up in Australia, keeping connectedness to my Vietnamese culture for myself and my children continues to be hard work. To witness the connection to country in the dreamtime stories of the first peoples that have endured for over 60,000 years always gives me a sense of awe.  

Likewise, I witness the strong connection to place and belonging of proud Westies.  
I am a Westie, first in Sydney, and have been a Westie here in Melbourne for 14 years.  

What then, about the West, that fires up our bellies?  

The Western Bulldogs you say!  

It’s the fighting spirit of the community – often against the odds – forged from shared adversities, small and great: access to public transport, finding work as industries shut in the West, leaving our home countries as migrants and refugees to find safety and opportunity in Australia. And of course, what makes the West is our wonderful diversity that you can see wherever you go. 

That fighting spirit and proud Westie community led us to adopt our values & ways of working. The values that shape everything we do:

Empathy, Amplify, Impact, Audacity. 

Empathy led us to our vision of bringing volunteering closer to people’s front doors and people’s hearts.

Our wonderful team rose to the challenge to realise this vision in a pragmatic way. We see that services should not only be a “come to our centre” approach.  

We take outreach one step further to make it easier for people to do great things for their community. This sees us meet people going about their day at farmers markets and shopping centres.  

Did you know 2.3 million Victorian volunteers contribute $58BN each year and that a typical volunteer contributes around $1500 p.a. from their own pockets after reimbursements? Volunteers deserve more support infrastructure that helps them start their volunteering journey, give them confidence, and most importantly, access relationships and networks that lead to jobs. 

This brings us to our value Amplify. 

We want to amplify the work of local volunteers and community groups.

We see our contribution and unique role in the West is to advocate for and marshal resources to groups that would struggle to get them: the small and medium community groups who often are the first welcoming doors of volunteers and newcomers, and all are the fabric of our society.  

Our WestSeed initiative as part of the VolConnect program will build up a valuable asset of embedded relationships and channels for government, councils and other groups to engage for future initiatives, such as COVID communications and community consultations. Network relationships are not static and require renewal. Volunteer West takes on this brokerage and facilitation work of being the backbone organisation. WestSeed reaches deeply into communities to identify at least 144 multicultural groups to offer them our FREE VolConnect services – so as to amplify their work and the work of their volunteers.     

Now Impact. 

We are proud to also formally unveil today a new collective impact model centred on people and community, that recognises the health, social and economic impacts of volunteering using systems-thinking principles.

The model is designed to be simple enough to deploy in small organisations and scalable for policy and council planning purposes.  

Finally, Audacity. 

This model is one of the first to bring differentiated facets of volunteering outcomes into the one framework for impact measurement.

The volunteering journey empowers people to bring about impacts for themselves and their community. 

We are championing a multi-sector leaders forum, West4West, to create a volunteering culture in Melbourne's west that goes beyond the traditional boundaries of community or government to business leaders. We believe regional volunteering support infrastructure should not be siloed by council area, or by sector.  

Despite Commonwealth funding cuts to the core place-based volunteering supports, we have the audacity to re-imagine and propose to you a truly regional support infrastructure:

VolREACH, a collaborative platform: Volunteering Research, Engagement & Advocacy Community Hubs. 

A minimum viable operating platform to take advantage of economies of scale is necessary to amplify and innovate. Operational funding to volunteer support services in the West was at 13 cents p.a. per person, well below the 25 cents national average. This amount is to be contrasted to the contribution of a typical volunteer, $1500 p.a. out-of-pocket, as noted previously. 

 
Over the coming months, we will begin to engage our key stakeholders, to co-design and contribute to meet needs of the West, whilst complementing respective service plans, economic and community development agendas.  

Volunteering support services are a critical – but not readily visible - component of the community sector. They are distinct from the community services provided by volunteers.

In short, we are the local support for the local supporters. 

VolConnect, for the first time, allows the for the depth, scale, and connections to unleash volunteering potential that would make proud Westies proud. To conclude, volunteering is an act of social and economic participation that forges connections for social cohesion and economic prosperity.