Community stories Disaster recovery stories: 30 November 2018
After the devastation of Bushfires, it is often the volunteers who help bring rural communities back to life. The Kinglake Ranges Neighbourhood House (KRNH) Inc coordinates more than 50 volunteers to run the Op Shop and regularly participate in activities at the Centre.
To better support the volunteers and encourage others to get involved they established the Volunteer Murrindindi Resource Centre, an online portal providing an easy to use platform for connecting volunteers and organisations to request and find volunteers, with huge success.
They sought funding to update the online portal and engage a person to embed the policies / procedures, establish an evaluation framework, train existing staff and further connect KRNH with outside volunteer engaging organisations.
Community meetings held at the Neighbourhood Centre have identified that many community groups are struggling to provide support in terms of training and governance, leading to problems recruiting fresh volunteers and retaining existing volunteers. The VMRC have developed Volunteering Policies and Procedures with the aim of supporting both the neighbourhood house and to share with local community groups. These need to be embedded into KRNH to ensure sustainability of the VMRC as an integral part of the KRNH.
With a Community Group Futures grant of $19,532 funded by the Victorian Bushfire Appeal Fund the KNRH were able to improve the online portal Volunteer Murrindindi within the broad scope of the Kinglake Ranges Neighbourhood House structure. We have developed the majority of the Policies and Procedures around the Volunteer Resource Centre and established annline presence through our Volunteer matching portal – www.volunteermurrindindi.com.au