Become a Charter Champion!

Your pledge to uphold and promote the Volunteer Charter will have a real impact on the experiences of volunteers, volunteer practice and volunteering within Scotland. If you are signing up on behalf of a volunteer involving organisation, the Charter will help to reinforce good practice and show that you are committed to appropriate volunteer roles.

If you influence decisions about volunteering, your pledge will communicate that you recognise the important contribution of volunteers and will use your influence to reinforce sustainable and appropriate volunteering.

This is up to you! Volunteer Scotland is not here to assess you or check compliance. We only ask that you actively consider how you can best promote and uphold the principles of the Charter in your work. We’ll check in with you periodically to find out how you are getting on.

Your pledge lasts 3 years. We’ll get in touch just before your pledge runs out to find out if you want to stop being a Charter Champion. We’ll only remove you from our Champion list if you tell us to.

We will send you quarterly emails with useful information about the Charter. We’ll also invite you to workshops where you can engage with other Charter Champions, and we will check in with you periodically to find out how you are getting on. Finally, we are always available to chat through any Charter related queries you might have.

We will host regular workshops for Charter Champions to network and share ideas. A list of registered Charter Champions is also available on our website for you to browse for any familiar names or organisations you can reach out to!

Yes! This pledge evidences your commitment to the Volunteer Charter and most Charter Champions will be at different stages of their journey. There may also be instances where you have a legitimate reason for not aligning with one of the principles, e.g. if you are a small community organisation and all your volunteers are from the community, you might not need to offer travel expenses. Pledging your support is a great first step and we are happy to help you identify solutions for any principles you are not sure about.

Yes! We would encourage any individual or organisation that influences how volunteering is resourced or deployed to consider becoming a Charter Champion. This might include intermediary organisations, regulatory bodies, funders, and elected representatives.

We welcome Charter Champions who maybe don’t work directly with volunteers but do have influence over how volunteering is resourced or deployed. The type of influence you have will depend on your role. Maybe you have responsibility for allocating funding which would ensure volunteering is adequately resourced. Or you might have influence over policy or legislation which is relevant for volunteering. We can have a chat with you to identify how you can best use your influence to promote and uphold the Charter.

This can be tricky, and the Volunteer Charter can help with this. You might want to ask these questions to help you answer this question:

• Was this role ever completed by a paid member of staff?
• Does this role include tasks which were mostly completed by a paid member of staff?
• What is our expectation of the volunteer in terms of time and responsibility and is this realistic?
• Is this role being implemented to help us cut costs or fill staff shortages?

If you answered yes for any of these questions, the role may not be appropriate for a volunteer. If you are still unsure, we can help you to assess this.

In most instances the principles of the Volunteer Charter are quite clear cut, but sometimes there are exceptions. For example, there might be legitimate reasons for not offering expenses e.g. all your volunteers are based in your local community. There are also some emergency or crisis response situations where volunteers might temporarily carry out similar duties to paid staff. We can provide you with guidance on your specific situation if you are unclear.