Social Welfare Part 2

Co-ordinating Volunteers

I started recruiting volunteers by advertising a training session. At its best, the training programme consisted of ten weeks of training, one morning per week.  It included two main parts: an introduction to interviewing, and networking in the New Plymouth community. Each training course also found a social need which they could start to meet as part of their training. 

We had no difficulty finding work for the volunteer teams: once they got the idea, social workers brought clients and issues to us regularly, and others popped out of the community.  I found that there was a new issue on my desk about every six weeks calling for action! 

There were two kinds of work that the volunteers took on. First there was helping the professional social workers with cases they were working with.  This took the form of helping to support the families. Secondly, there were volunteer groups tackling issues in the community. 

The family support work was done in groups, one for each locality of the city and province. Eventually we had around fifteen of these groups, each with a Senior Volunteer. These people could claim travelling expenses if they had more than a short journey to their clients’ homes.  Some of them eventually helped three or four families at once. 

The work they did included helping the mothers with budgetting, helping them find accommodation, helping them find furniture if they were shifting house, helping them with ideas for controlling wayward children, putting them in touch with the right agencies, and so on. Each fortnight the group would meet with their Senior Volunteer, and I usually attended these meetings. We would hear how the client families were coping, and discuss ways of helping them further if necessary. Sometimes another volunteer would be called in to help if a family was carrying an extra load. 

Groups covered all the suburbs, and the country towns as far as Eltham. There were two groups each in Stratford and Waitara. 

In my early years with the Social Welfare Dept,
our offices looked out of the lowest row of windows
in the main section of this building, which was then
run by Govt Life Insurance. It has since been a rest home, and
is now upmarket apartments.

Once a month or so I met with all the Senior Volunteers, and often we had community workers from other organisations, like District Nursing, Maori Affairs, or Internal Affairs with us. Many of these other outfits referred cases to us when they saw what we were doing. Sometimes we were helping as many as 100 individual families. 

The specialist groups developed from needs brought to our attention by our work in the community. First there was the community education work at the Girls High School. Soon we found a second issue that needed our attention: the activities for rest home residents.  In those days there was no requirement for rest homes to employ diversional therapists. So we started with one rest home, and a group was collected to go in once a week to run activities. 

Before long other rest homes asked for help and eventually we had ten rest homes on our list.  Some of them were using our volunteers three days a week.  We had one volunteer who pushed a tea trolley around selling fruit and sweets. One of the senior volunteers, who had had experience in a rest home overseas, took on the responsibility for organising these groups. 

Another early issue was the provision of second-hand furniture for families setting up home after a separation. Previously social workers had spent a lot of time helping this need.  But we set up a small group of men, who were keen to help with this work, and they found a suitable garage to store the furniture, and people who were prepared to donate items. We called this operation SHUFEL: Supplying Households with Used Furniture in Emergency Lots.

 

(to be continued)