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Guardian volunteering week runs from 17-21 September. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Guardian volunteering week runs from 17-21 September. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Guardian volunteering week begins

This article is more than 11 years old
Guardian volunteering week starts today and projects with community partners have been aligned to shared objectives

Now in its third year, volunteering week is fast becoming a tradition at Guardian News and Media (GNM). The programme has gone from strength to strength and this year's activities begin this week, 17 September.

Throughout the event, 253 GNM volunteers will join our community partners for a day across our sites in Kings Cross, Stratford and Manchester. We are running 16 projects in total, including:

Inspiring inmates at HMP Pentonville through a series of media and skills workshops.

Delivering media training to the staff at the London Wildlife Trust.

Putting together and delivering a Leading for Good skills development programme for pupils at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school.

Organising a training seminar on "the future of journalism" for Live Magazine.

Each of our projects is tailored to the specific needs of the community partner and managed by a volunteer project manager. The project manager can rely on internal support from a project sponsor, typically one of our executive board members or a director. This way we secure broad participation across the organisation and make sure that taking part in the volunteering programme is not just accepted but seen as a prestigious thing to do.

The week complements our ongoing community partnering programme, in which staff are free to spend two days a year volunteering with our community partners. Many of our employees make use of their allowance on a weekly or monthly basis and have become trusted partners in the local community, which mirrors where we want to be as an organisation. Volunteering week is an important recruitment vehicle for the ongoing community partnering programme and we have designed each project with longevity in mind.

Corporate volunteering has (deservedly) received its fair share of criticism for being tokenistic and not always focused on bringing about real change. Our aim is to apply the same rigour to our volunteering activities as we do to running our business. We carried out an evaluation of our community programme earlier this year and it demonstrated clearly that the most successful partnerships are those where our volunteers use their professional skills.

Knowing this, we have aligned volunteering week objectives with our own digital transformation strategy, preparing GNM for an increasingly digital future. Many of our community partners are facing the same digital challenges as us – new audiences, new revenue models and new forms of engagement. As many of our employees are at the forefront of managing these new challenges – and still learning, of course – we thought they could test and use their skills for the benefit of our community partners and the take-up has been phenomenal.

The main change since last year is that a higher proportion of our projects are heavily skills-based – 11 out of 16 to be exact. In other words, it promises to be a learning experience for everyone. We look forward to updating you on our activities.

Christian Toennesen from Acona is working with the Sustainability team to deliver volunteering week.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the voluntary sector network, click here.

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