Volunteering Tactical Co-ordination Group
Posted on: May 20, 2020
Content from Essex Future News
Across the county individuals and organisations have offered their time and resources to help support communities, with offers ranging from spontaneous support helping neighbours to organisations offering fleets of vehicles and members of staff. To make sure these offers of support are connected to those who need the support, a volunteering Tactical Co-ordination Group (TCG) has been established. The group is made up of representatives across the Essex system including Police, Fire and voluntary sector and has drawn in expertise and best practice from outside of Essex.
Over the last two weeks the TCG has produced a code of conduct and tasking framework, and a strategic co-ordination approach to bring together offers and requests for support. The code of conduct has been made available for those organisations recruiting spontaneous volunteers to set out expectations and ensure our volunteers can help the effort safely. The tasking framework offers guidance to those coordinating volunteers as to the appropriateness of using volunteers for certain activities and levels of checks that are advised based upon associated risks (whether fraud or safeguarding).
To ensure join up on strategic offers and requests for support across Essex, the group have been establishing a clear pathway and offer that ensure immediate needs are met efficiently and that there are clear processes in place to provide join up and take this forward on an ongoing basis. Some of the immediate support from the group includes bringing together volunteers and Ford to support the movement and set up of hospital beds. The insight and experience that has been shared from across the system has helped us start to understand the immediate impact and longer term effect of the pandemic on the voluntary and community sector in Essex. Next steps will be to use this insight to support recovery planning as we work together towards a strategic response that supports sustainability going forwards.
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