Question
During the first lockdown the residents of Wokingham volunteered to
help provide food and services to the vulnerable across the whole
of Wokingham Borough, and I would like to add my thanks to the
volunteers for all their help – so what did Wokingham Borough
Council do when the first lockdown finished in June 2020 to
continue to encourage, support and possibly increase the numbers of
registered volunteers so that when another long lockdown occurred
as now, they were ready to go into immediate action to once again
help the vulnerable in Wokingham?
Minutes:
Question:
During the first lockdown the residents of Wokingham volunteered to help provide food and services to the vulnerable across the whole of Wokingham Borough, and I would like to add my thanks to the volunteers for all their help – so what did Wokingham Borough Council do when the first lockdown finished in June 2020; to continue to encourage, support and possibly increase the numbers of registered volunteers so that when another long lockdown occurred as now, they were ready to go into immediate action to once again help the vulnerable in Wokingham?
Answer:
In the first lockdown a Voluntary and Community Sector Action Group was established, which initially met three times a week and now has continued since and now to meet twice a week with good attendance. This is led by a senior officer from WBC and consists of all the lead officers from organisations across the Borough, such as the CAB, the LINK, the Volunteer Centre, and various others. One of the products of this was One Front Door which has provided a single route for support and has been very successful from March 2020. The One Front Door was never stood down and will continue as long as is required.
During the first lock down lots of unofficial local Covid groups also sprung up. With the VCS the coordination charity Involve, supported their development and we now have 11 local Covid groups, and they are accepting referrals.
As the lockdown eased, the majority of these groups stood by to support residents across the Borough as required. The Friendship Alliance which is a VCS/ Wokingham Borough initiative to combat loneliness and isolation, took on the role of maintaining communication. The Friendship Alliance has also supported a couple of new groups which has ensured the whole Borough is covered.
The key task, to which you refer, is to ensure that we have sufficient volunteers to support the response to Covid. The Wokingham Volunteer Centre, which is a key part of the group, operates as the main contact and recruiting point for general volunteering. They respond to support the requirements and needs for volunteers across the Borough and react as the need changes. For instance, we needed more befrienders / welfare callers, and they ran an event, Volunteer Week to attract more. At the time of writing, we have always had more than enough volunteers to cover the needs of the community and the services we wished to run.
In recent times the need for volunteers has widened to provide support to the vaccination programme, which has been led by the Wokingham Volunteer Centre. The activities of some parts of the VCS have been stepped up over the winter. The approach has always been proportionate, and we have always tried to react to the changing need. We have always had more than enough volunteers to cover the services we need.
Supplementary Question:
We are not going to let any slide?
Supplementary Answer:
No, I can assure you that we are fully committed to seeing this through. One of the senior members of the Adult Social Care team leads this group and he reports directly into the Director. We need the Voluntary Sector because the bottom line is the Council cannot take on many of the tasks that the Voluntary Sector does, and also the Voluntary Sector is better at some of them then the Council would be. The vaccination call for volunteers has been an example of this and has generated nearly 500 volunteers in a very short period of time, which is more than enough basically to cover the need. We are committed to going forwards to when this is all over, and it will be some day, to learning lessons from this, learning good parts from this, and incorporating them into our thinking going forwards.