Involving Clients as Volunteers

Many homelessness agencies won't accept clients as volunteers. OSW aimed to break down this barrier by promoting good practice, and highlighting the good practice in organisations who involve their clients. Successfully involving clients as volunteers means developing a volunteer management system that tackles potential problems from the beginning. We developed a Good Practice Resource Bank, designed to help organisations develop policies and procedures to make client involvement work. It collects together good practice tips from a variety of organisations that actively involve their clients as volunteers.

Volunteer Lunch Expenses campaign

In June 2006 the DWP issued 'A Guide to Volunteering While on Benefits'. The leaflet stated that volunteers on benefits could not legitimately claim lunch expenses. This was a reinterpretation of the regulations which state volunteers can be reimbursed expenses "reasonably incurred". Up until then everyone had seen lunch as a reasonable expense because it costs more to buy a meal out than it does to eat at home. The DWP argued that it was not a reasonable expense because benefits were "already meant to cover the cost of your basic needs, including lunch".

From our research, we knew that homeless people found not having lunch expenses reimbursed a major barrier to volunteering, so this reinterpretation of the guidelines represented a major setback in our work to make volunteering more accessible. We spearheaded a campaign:

• Asking volunteer involving organisations to write to the DWP and their local MP's to express their concerns;
• Producing and disseminating a briefing paper summarising our arguments; and
• Working with Volunteering England to act as a point of contact for organisations wanting to know more about the campaign.

The huge amount of pressure they received from the voluntary sector meant that the DWP could not continue to justify their argument. Finally, two months after the original leaflet had been issued, they announced they were scrapping the guidelines and working on a new set of rulings allowing all volunteers on benefits to claim lunch expenses.

For further information, you can read the briefing paper (195 Kb) summarising the argument for paying volunteers on benefits lunch expenses.