Spirit of Manchester Awards and Housing Justice Quality Mark
Recognition for our amazing volunteers.
You already know (hopefully!) how much we appreciate our volunteers, and it has been great to receive recognition not only for their great work but also for the work our staff do behind the scenes to support volunteers.
First of all, over the last year our night shelter coordinator, Vron, has been working hard to make sure that our night shelter is the best it can be. It is so important that our accommodation is safe and that all the processes and activities linked to the night shelter are well organised, ultimately so that our night shelter guests and everyone involved in the project can have confidence in how we work. It's taken months of hard work and many meetings and conversations with our different venue coordinators and volunteers, but we were so excited to be awarded the Housing Justice Quality Mark for Excellent Practice at the end of our season! We shared the news and celebrated with the volunteers who attended our night shelter volunteer thank you event in May- thank you to all of our 320+ volunteers who've helped us to make our night shelters "excellent" this year!
The next piece of good news is that last week we heard that we've been shortlisted for a Spirit of Manchester Award! There are so many great organisations across Manchester who've been nominated across a range of different areas this year- ours is the 'Volunteer Involving Organisation' category.
Over the last few years we've worked hard to develop the way in which we recruit, train and support volunteers. Depending on the roles people have, we go through a specific induction, provide a volunteer handbook, and offer various support opportunities and processes. We want to look after our volunteers and make sure they know how much we appreciate them! We value the chance to bring volunteers together with our wider Boaz family through thank you events, ad hoc training and get-togethers and of course our Family Nights. It's also great to see clients become volunteers, volunteers become staff and staff become volunteers... there are so many ways that volunteers are involved in our work.
The awards ceremony will take place later in the year, but in the meantime thank you again to all our volunteers, to the staff who support them, and good luck to everyone who has been nominated for one of the Spirit of Manchester Awards!