VOLUNTEER FROM HOME

The Live Project Team has been working towards a target of 500 new entries to considerably expand the existing Shelter Library. However this is by no means a finite quantity and a serious concern for the Live Project Team has been how the library can be expanded and maintained after our input, particularly considering the nature of the information and its reliance on up-to-date information and new technologies.

For this reason the team has been working on creating a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that enables future Shelter interns to easily maintain the library, drastically reducing the ‘floundering’ period of the research. However, the Shelter Centre is a small organisation, largely comprised of interns on short placements and properly maintaining the library would require a significant commitment from the Shelter Centre.

The Live Project Team believe that there is a potential resource of willing volunteers that can be utilised by Shelter Centre. In a sector where volunteering information exchange is as important or more important than volunteering physical presence, we believe that our SOP could be used remotely enabling people to volunteer time from locations all over the world. In the past Shelter Centre has tended to disregard using volunteers without extensive experience within the humanitarian sector. However, a detailed SOP to manage volunteers, fully tried and tested, offers people with limited prior knowledge the opportunity to contribute, by following a step by step procedure.