Our volunteers are crucial to our work at Butterfly Conservation. We are committed to finding new ways to recruit, support and celebrate them. We need a vibrant volunteer community that is motivated, diverse and energised.
2019 saw the formation of a new team at Butterfly Conservation who are working to support and develop our volunteer community. We are exploring different ideas and looking at different pathways to volunteering.
We would like to better support our Branches by ensuring that we can offer training and development opportunities for existing volunteers. We want our volunteers to be better resourced and for them to be able to achieve their own goals in return for the time they give to us.
We also want to create more varied volunteer opportunities that will bring a new wave of support for our work. We recognise that people from all walks of life give their time to volunteer for many different reasons. It is important that we have something to offer to everyone. We were recently awarded funding from the National Lottery Heritage Innovation Fund to allow us to explore the question "How do young people want to volunteer in Conservation?". We ran a number of sessions with young people aged 14-24 and shared what we learnt through a webinar. Encouraging more young people to volunteer is a big priority for us, so we're hoping to take this work even further in 2023 and 2024.
Finally yet importantly, we want to give an even bigger platform to our fantastic volunteers. There are so many wonderful stories of personal achievement and collective success to share and celebrate. We're very excited that we will be rolling out a new volunteer portal in late 2023 and early 2024, which will significantly help us with this!