Volunteer Centres in York and North Yorkshire have positive relationships with the Private Sector.  Enquiries often come from people who want to volunteer to get the experience they need to gain paid employment, and sometimes that experience is only available in the private sector.  Examples might include things like web-design, printing, journalism, retail, or business-related office and administration tasks.

 

Benefits of volunteering in the Private Sector

 

• Volunteers benefit from volunteering in the private sector by gaining valuable, hands-on experience that can help them get into paid work.

 

• Businesses can benefit by gaining an extra pair of hands, and by fostering positive relationships with the local community.

 

There is a perception that some employers might exploit voluntary labour, at the expense of paid workers, but this tends not to be the case, for several reasons:

 

• It is unrealistic to expect a volunteer to take on the full range of responsibilities that a paid worker would take on.  Where employers and organisations do this they tend to find that the volunteer doesn’t stick around for long.  Volunteers can usually tell if they are being taken for a ride, and will vote with their feet, because they can!

 

• Volunteer Centres will not support organisations, whether private or otherwise, that have unrealistic expectations of volunteers, or where they are attempting to get volunteers to carry out work that should be part of a paid position.  So businesses that tried to do this would not get help from the Volunteer Centre, and would be less likely to succeed in gaining volunteers to support their work.

 

Volunteer Centres can offer advice and support in identifying possible volunteering placements that are manageable and useful to businesses.  

 

Get in touch with your local Volunteer Centre if you would like to find out more about how your business could support someone who wants to gain voluntary career experience.

 

Social Enterprise

 

Social Enterprises take many forms; some are charities with trading arms, others are set up in the same way that a business would be.  They share a common ethos to pursue social aims and to reinvest profits to support their social goals:

 

Social enterprises are businesses driven by a social or environmental purpose. There are 62,000 of them in the UK, contributing over £24bn to the economy, employing approximately 800,000 people (2005-2007 data from the Annual Survey of Small Business UK).

 

Social Enterprise Coalition, http://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/pages/about-social-enterprise.html

 

According to the Thriving Third Sector Report, 2008, 5% of the research respondents identified as a Social Enterprise, though “about a third of TSOs earn more than half of their income from contracts or trading, 28% earn up to 50% of their income this way...” suggesting that different organisations may interpret social enterprise in different ways, since these activities fit within the social enterprise model.

 

Despite the economic downturn, social enterprise is growing, suggesting that it may have an increasing role to play in providing services that are beneficial to the community:

 

since the economic downturn began, 56% have increased their turnover from the previous year whilst less than 20% have seen it go down. This is a considerably better performance than SMEs in the UK, where only 28% increased their turnover and 43% saw it go down.

 

Social Enterprise Coalition,http://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/pages/state_of_social_enterprise.html

 

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