Corporate & Employee Volunteer Programs/Community Skills Bank is all about local voluntary groups providing businesses with opportunities to develop their staff, and businesses helping local voluntary groups to opportunities to develop their staff, and businesses helping local voluntary groups to improve their service to the community.

Local Community Need.
To serve the community effectively, local non-profit organisations, charities and community groups need to perform many of the same activities as a business: for example designing a website, negotiating a lease, setting up accounting procedures, developing a business plan, or promoting their service. Local community groups are often unable to afford the necessary skills to complete these activities.

Business Need
Many companies have a framework of core skills and competencies required by successful employees. These will usually include:

• Listening, negotiating, managing others, and developing effective teams
• Innovating
• Self management and achieving objectives on time
• Taking decisions
• Analysing, thinking, and communicating clearly in writing and verbally
• Financial and budgeting skills

Many of these personal skills are best developed through experience rather than classroom training.

How can the Community Skills Bank help?
Through the Skills Bank, businesses can find a community project which will provide an employee or employees with the experience needed for personal and team skills development and help the local community. Projects are short, one-off, and usually completed over a period of less than 3 months.

A community project can be a particularly effective training and development tool because employees:

• Have to adjust to an unfamiliar environment
• Have to depend on their own initiative and take decisions
• Have the opportunity to learn from different management styles
• Are motivated to succeed because the project is for the local community, and gain
• personal satisfaction as well as confidence from completing a new challenge
• Develop “people” skills.

In addition, through the Skills Bank, businesses can realise the benefits of giving something back to the local community, enhancing their local reputation, and building relationships with the local community.

To learn more about how you can become part of an Employee Volunteer Program or Community Skills Bank and volunteer for a Community Skills Projects, contact Carl Holroyd On 97542047 (Mondays & Wednesdays) or contact Busselton Dunsborough Volunteer Centre directly.