Volunteering

I have been retired for three years now and am always finding there aren’t enough hours in the day.  When I retired I was definite about steering clear of helping out in school – I felt I needed a break from the environment that has consumed my working life.  But I didn’t want to stay at home all the time even though there is always something to do.

In the UK if you volunteer to help out in the community you have to go through a process where you have a background check, carried out by the police, to ensure that you have not contravened any laws that would indicate you were of unsuitable character to work with children or vulnerable adults.    You have to produce identifying documents such as a passport and a driving licence, and list all the places you have ever lived, and all the names you have been known by.  Until recently it was known as a CRB check (Criminal Records Bureau), and is now called a  DBS  check (Disclosure and Barring Service ) and it can take quite a while for you to be checked out.

First I volunteered at Church to help out with the holiday club when church puts on a week of activities for children during the long summer holidays.  By the end of the week I was shattered but I enjoyed the event and we had lots of good comments from the children and their parents. So I have enhanced CRB clearance to work with the children during holiday club.

Next, I spotted a poster at the library asking for volunteers to deliver books to housebound library members.  This means that once a month I deliver a bag of books to each of my clients.  This also required a CRB check – it involved volunteering for library services so I needed to be vetted as I would be visiting vulnerable adults in their homes.  So I had to fill in the same form, and send it to the same place as my first CRB check.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with the children’s worker at church.  She visits local schools, taking assemblies and helping out with their delivery of Religious Education.  She told me that she runs a dinnertime club at a school and was looking to enlist help from a team of people to give a hand with the activities.  Since the school is almost next door to my home and would involve just an hour, once a week – and not every week – I have volunteered.

I have had to have a third vetting clearance, now done online, so this was processed quite quickly.  I am happy to be checked out because it is for the well being of the children and adults I come into contact with but it is surely an expensive and unnecessary duplication to need such a check for every different organisation I help.

Having helped out for the first time this week I enjoyed working with the children.  It is the first time I have been into school since I retired but it has not given me a hankering to return to teaching.  The children were lovely, the school very welcoming, but how nice not to have to prepare lesson plans and fulfil all the many tedious tasks that have been imposed on the teaching profession in the last two decades.