Speakers: Stephen Hill, Head of Volunteering, Francesca Goff, Volunteering Advisor, The V&A
This session will share the V&A’s journey in re-examining and redesigning our volunteering model as we opened three new museums in three years (Young V&A, V&A East Storehouse and V&A East Museum). It will highlight the insights, choices and challenges that shaped the adoption of a new approach to volunteering across a rapidly expanding family of sites.
Key themes are:
• Commissioning external research to establish a clear baseline and the realities of our starting point.
• Recognising the need to strengthen our core volunteering foundations, including policy, strategy and processes, to make sure we could support exciting and sustainable future growth.
• Adopting a decentralised volunteering model that embeds volunteering into organisational culture and allows for meaningful, flexible volunteer opportunities that benefit both volunteers and staff.
• Creating organisation-wide consistency, meaning that volunteering practices can be transferred across sites while honouring each museum’s distinct identity.
• How lessons learned from our new sites have been applied back into our long-established V&A South Kensington site to improve volunteering practice across the organisation.
Main image credit: Jessica Eliza Ross, image courtesy of V&A
Stephen Hill, Head of Volunteering
Francesca Goff, Volunteering Advisor
