And these can focus on employment areas which are quite hard to break into in the UK - things like journalism or medical placements for example. Although for these placements we'd usually be looking for volunteers to have a little bit of relevant experience or knowledge on their CVs.""Journalism, for example, can be quite competitive in the UK," she says, "so working in this area abroad can be a really valuable way of gaining experience. As well as getting work in the field, you're also often getting really hands-on because of the way the placement works. Whether you want to work with children or build websites, someone, somewhere can find a use for your time. And if you want to get into a particularly competitive area of employment, overseas volunteering can be a good way to break in, as Sarah Horner from volunteer organisation i-to-i explains: "We have some more vocational placements. The initiative isn't shy about promoting the less altruistic motives for the potential volunteer to consider: from gaining transferable skills, to more abstract rewards such as reducing stress. Recent research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has revealed that people who live in areas that record high levels of informal voluntary activity in their neighbourhood enjoy better health, higher GCSE grades and fewer burglaries.Professor Paul Whiteley, Programme Director of the ESRC Democracy and Participation Research Programme that produced the findings explains: "The research has revealed an interesting link between helping others and enjoying a good quality of life.
It seems that when we focus on the needs of others, we may also reap benefits ourselves. It means that voluntary activity in the community is associated with better health, lower crime, improved educational performance and greater life satisfaction. Communities with lots of civic and community engagement are also communities that have environments that foster favourable outcomes such as these."Work experience and volunteer work has long been a mutually rewarding way for people to gain skills which can make them more desirable employees. A lot of what we're doing in places like Sri Lanka involves strategic planning as to how to locally deliver the large amount of resources which have come from other countries."To try to address the skills shortage in the voluntary sector, the Chancellor Gordon Brown has declared 2005 "The Year of the Volunteer", a government-sponsored initiative to encourage active citizenship and make volunteering an accessible choice for as many people as possible.
They can understand why we would need technical people, or teachers, or doctors, but we also really need people who are experienced in managerial roles. "The biggest areas in terms of people we need are experienced teachers, managers and healthcare staff," says Williams. "In fact it's one of the aspects of volunteering which can be quite difficult to explain to people. Certainly, we dug deep and made unprecedented donations at the time. Charities and volunteer organisations were besieged with offers of help from everyone from students, doctors and teachers to bankers and advertising executives.
