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Volunteering

Volunteers are extremely valuable to the canteen in ensuring the canteen is efficiently run, and allowing a healthy profit. When looking for volunteers keep in mind the social, ethnic and educational backgrounds of your school community. Volunteers can be parents, students or people from the wider community including churches, the Salvation Army, Senior Citizens Association, RSL clubs or even Volunteering Australia.

Promoting the benefits of volunteering!

Volunteering offers the opportunity to:

Make new friends
Provide social opportunities
Help the school community
Get to know teachers and parents
Increase knowledge and skills
Learn about food and nutrition.

Make sure to:

Keep volunteer workload and responsibility reasonable.
Allow volunteers time to adjust and become confident in their role.
Offer volunteer roles suitable to their skills, knowledge and interest, for example, a volunteer may not feel comfortable with customer service, but prefer food preparation.
Communicate clearly.
Provide a positive and rewarding working environment.
Ensure the confidentiality of their personal details.
Keep volunteers informed of changes in the canteen, such as new menu items or policy changes.
Make sure volunteers are rewarded and appreciated.
Be prepared for where additional volunteer assistance may be required, such as sporting events or special menu days.

Recruiting volunteers
Advertise regularly and widely through:

The school newsletter
The school website
School orientation evenings
Parent evenings
In the local newspaper
Get students to write a letter to parents requesting volunteer help and place in the school newsletter

Often advertising for canteen volunteer assistance is more successful by including a canteen roster in the advertisement and indicating which gaps need to be filled.

Welcoming volunteers
It is important to welcome and introduce new volunteers to canteen and school staff on their first day, give a tour, and run through policy and procedures. A welcome letter should be sent to new volunteers before their first day and should also list important documents which should be given to them as well.

Rewarding volunteers
Recognising and rewarding volunteers is vital to make volunteers feel valued, appreciated and to keep them motivated. This fact sheet will to assist your canteen in rewarding and recognising volunteers’ contributions. Download Rewarding volunteers (188kb, pdf).

Often volunteers assisting for long periods of time, or even one day events, are forgotten when it comes to saying thank you.

Acknowledgement

This information has been sourced from Nutrition Australia.

Last updated: 09/14/2009

'Go for your life' Infoline - 1300 73 98 99