Innovate Trust are delighted to have received funding from the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action’s Volunteering Wales Strategic Grant for the Beyond Barriers project.
The project is a partnership with Skills and Volunteering Cymru (SVC) and will bring together Innovate Trust’s wealth of experience supporting people with learning disabilities within their home and the community, alongside SVC’s 50 years’ experience delivering volunteering projects across Wales to combat loneliness and isolation.
The Beyond Barriers project will explore barriers to volunteering within health and social care supported living settings for people with learning disabilities.
Innovate Trust and SVC have been running a volunteer befriender scheme within the homes of people with learning disabilities since 2018.
Within the first phase of the project, we will be carrying out a deep dive into the scheme, collecting data from people with learning disabilities, community volunteers and health and social care workers to fully understand the culture around volunteering in our organisation and the wider sector.
Within phase two of the project, we will be utilising the data we collect to coproduce a framework for embedding volunteering within learning disability health and social care services and exploring Volunteering to Career pathways.
We know that the exploration of Volunteer to Career pathways can have many positive outcomes for individual volunteers, organisations and people accessing services.
Beyond Barriers will widen the work that has taken place so far and add valuable insights specific to the learning disability sector.
We are excited to be launching a project with the potential to deliver significant benefits to the third sector in Wales, at a time when many organisations are under immense pressure.
By committing to understanding the barriers to volunteering, adapting our ways of working, and fully embedding volunteering into our approach, we aim to strengthen not only our own organisation but also support greater resilience across the sector in the years ahead.
