I was recently at a friend’s party. I knew one person there – the hostess, who had invited me – and so I was duly forced to mingle with people I didn’t know. With everyone I met, I found myself asking the same familiar questions: “What’s your name?”, “Who do you know here?”, and the […]

JVN were honoured this week to be invited to the office of the Mayor of Barnet, Councillor Brian Schama. A member of the Jewish community – he conducts no civic events on Shabbat and other festivals – the Mayor was eager to share his views on volunteering and the Jewish community in the London Borough […]

Volunteering for a particular cause or organisation is often a way of becoming extremely passionate about it. People can go to extreme lengths in terms of the time they dedicate and, in some circumstances, the risks they take to see their vision become a reality. In this blog, JVN Intern Elliot Cukier examines just how far […]

The passing of Baroness Thatcher last week marked, for many, the end of an era, but her legacy of ‘Thatcherism’ will live on in the actions of governments and the minds of the British public for decades, possibly centuries, to come. Love her or hate her, one cannot deny that she was the woman Prime […]

Leonie and I recently wrote an article entitled Who Want to Be a Volunteer?, printed in the 2013 Charity Matters supplement in the Jewish Chronicle a few weeks ago. In this article, volunteering in schools was identified as one of the two means of volunteering that has come to the fore in recent years (the […]

Many of us who volunteer use our skills to do so. Whether we have learnt them through academia, during the course of our professional careers or simply out of life experience, the tools and talents that we have developed throughout our lives can really shine through in the world of volunteering. Whether you are a […]

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago entitled ‘What Makes A Volunteering Role Suitable’, highlighting the need to change our attitudes towards the ‘suitability’ of a candidate for a particular volunteering role. I asserted that ‘those who claim to have individual support needs should be taken on their individual merits, not as part of […]

It has been four months since the London 2012 Games ended, and one word more than others has been used to describe the vision for the future: Legacy. There was a thought, back in September, of “the Games are over: now what?” Lord Coe pledged, when presenting Britain’s bid for the Games back in 2005, […]

It is no secret that in order to get the most out of people in their job, you need to find someone to fit the job description. You wouldn’t invite a history graduate to speak at a nuclear physics conference, and you wouldn’t send a fisherman to fight a fire. Why not? Because they aren’t […]

JVN’s new employee volunteering scheme, Embrace, is in full swing, with a brand new website and more and more businesses and charitiesbecoming involved. This week, the JVN team decided to put our money where our mouth is and embark on some employee volunteering of our own with GIFT. Meeting at the GIFT warehouse on Tuesday evening we helped […]

This penultimate blog post of 2012 will reflect on two major changes that will affect JVN going into the New Year, both of which have occurred within the last week. The first change sees the end of the Jubilee Hour campaign. This campaign was set up by John O’Brien and his team of staff in […]

The winter season is meant to be a time of caring, sharing and goodwill. But every so often something comes along that dampens our spirits. Looking for a bit of positive news about the charity sector’s fortunes over the last year, we turned to the Back Britain’s Charities campaign, who only two weeks ago reported […]

On 21st November, some of the female members of JVN’s staff team went to TrainE-TraidE‘s Women in the Workplace Conference in Finchley. The conference was extremely well-attended and twelve speakers, experts in their fields, led workshops on a large variety of topics, including JVN Director Leonie’s workshop entitled “Volunteering – your way back into work.” […]

And so we come to the end – our last Olympic- and Paralympic-related blog post. I hope you have enjoyed reading them and have perhaps been inspired by the stories of volunteering. Again, there are two stories this week. The first comes from Daniel Musikant, who volunteered at both sets of Games and, as you […]

Another week, another fantastic volunteering story from The Greatest Show on Earth! This week’s entry comes from Eli Benson, who works for Magen David Adom (MDA UK). Used to helping people for a living, Eli tells us how he takes the kindness learned from his job and transfers it into the world of volunteering… The […]