Chief Executive, Volunteer Glasgow
In an effort to improve people’s volunteering and employment opportunities and experiences, Glasgow City Council (Community Justice Glasgow) and Volunteer Glasgow colleagues co-hosted a student placement from January to March 2024 for the University of Strathclyde BA (Hons) Education and Social Services (Year 4) class. The student project has assisted partners to collate best practice for organisations to enable people to use their lived experience of the justice system appropriately in suitable volunteering and employment opportunities.
The report recognises that people with criminal convictions can bring a wealth of lived experience and knowledge to organisations. Volunteers can draw on this when supporting service users or shaping the development of a service. Many individuals use their time in custody to gain qualifications, learn new skills, or volunteer in a diverse range of roles. Many of these skills are transferable to community-based organisations. These positive influences should be nurtured and built upon when returning to a community setting.
In Scotland, there is a rising movement to ensure that people’s knowledge and experience gained from their life experiences are respected and that their voices are heard in policy and practice through meaningful participation in decisions that impact them. However, this cultural shift is ongoing, and there are still instances when individuals are participating without sufficient time or resources being allocated to them, and where the participants’ ability to affect things feels rather restricted and predetermined.
Developing strong evidence about the impact of having people participate actively and equally in the creation of policy and practice is crucial if realising the goal of having people meaningfully share their lived experiences to influence decisions and actions made at the policy level. We also need to understand what good practice looks like, and what obstacles and facilitators exist in connecting with people who have lived experiences.
The report focuses on scoping what supports are already available in the Glasgow area with recommendations on how best to work towards creating shared guidelines, best practice, and the implementation of an employability pipeline.
The recommendations of the report will be led by a member of the Community Justice Glasgow team through the mechanism of the Community Justice Learning Skills and Employability Forum. This will ensure that we can tap into a wide range of knowledge and skills. A copy of the full report and recommendations can be found HERE. We will report on progress next year – WATCH THIS SPACE!
Also in 2024, Glasgow Girls’ Club and Volunteer Glasgow have collaborated with support from Glasgow City Council (Community Justice Glasgow) to enhance the “Let’s Get Connected” mobile (which is free to download from Google Play and Apple’s App Store) and desktop app by streaming information on live volunteering opportunities from the Volunteer Glasgow digital services platform provided by Team Kinetic.
This development means that opportunities already advertised by Volunteer Glasgow on behalf of hundreds of public and third sector organisations across Glasgow can now be found on the app, in addition to the Volunteer Glasgow website and app. The Let’s Get Connected App was originally developed to link people coming into contact with the justice system with services that could address their needs and underlying drivers of offending behaviour, including those that could lead them onto the employability pathway.
Margaret Smith, Manager at Community Justice Glasgow commented:
I have had the pleasure of working alongside partner colleagues for a number of years at Volunteer Glasgow and Glasgow Girls Club who worked with Community Justice to develop the Let’s Get Connected App. It is great to work with organisations who see the value in partnership working and who understand the value that pooling all of our knowledge, understanding and expertise together – to meet the needs of Glasgow’s citizens brings – especially those who are often the most disadvantaged, the most in need of support, and with the biggest barriers to accessing the opportunities to put them on a better trajectory to improve their own lives, which would describe an awful lot of people who come into the justice system.
By building those stronger pathways, removing the barriers, we will have the greatest impact. I look forward to more of that partnership work – seeing what new and innovative ways we can progress going into the next year and the difference that will make.
The Let’s Get Connected App: https://app.letsget.scot/Volunteer