Volunteering for Health (Norfolk and Waveney)

As part of Volunteering for Health, we’ve launched the Get InVOLved Skills website, a hub designed to support the development of skills needed to recruit, manage, and work effectively with volunteers.

If you work in health or social care and want to strengthen your confidence in involving volunteers, the site provides best‑practice guidance, practical tools, and real‑life case studies to help you get started.

Get InVOLved Skills also includes a wide range of training opportunities for volunteers themselves, helping people learn about topics that interest them while contributing to their local community.

The Get Involved Innovation Fund provides grants to local VCSE organisations to test new ways of enabling and supporting people with learning disabilities, autism, and looked‑after children to take part in volunteering.

You can find updates on future funding rounds and emerging learning from the funded projects on the Get Involved Innovation Fund webpage.

With support from the Norfolk and Suffolk ICB, Voluntary Norfolk is leading development work to build sustainable volunteering infrastructure within local primary care. This aims to strengthen the role of volunteers across GP practices and improve patient experience.

The Institute for Volunteering Research at the University of East Anglia is carrying out an evaluation of the programme. Their findings will help us understand the impact of this test‑and‑learn approach and guide long‑term decisions about volunteering infrastructure across health and care.

GP practices, dental surgeries and community pharmacies are where most people regularly engage with the health system. Volunteering in these settings has historically been limited. By embedding volunteering into Primary Care, we have a real opportunity to do things differently. 

Strengthening volunteering in Primary Care can: 

• Improve patient experience through friendly welcomes, navigation and wellbeing support 

• Ease pressure on staff through appropriate non-clinical roles, without becoming role substitution 

• Strengthen community connections and reach underserved groups .

As volunteering continues to change and people look for more flexible ways to give their time, Primary Care is a natural place to start reimagining how volunteering can work. 

Our Progress So Far 
Over the past 5 months, we’ve been working closely with five GP practices in the first phase of the programme. These conversations have been open, practical and collaborative, allowing us to co-create volunteer roles that fit within Primary Care settings. 

Together, we’re developing clear volunteer role frameworks, strengthening governance arrangements including Patient Participation Groups to support practices to build safe, confident systems for hosting volunteers. This groundwork, while often happening behind the scenes, is essential in creating volunteering that is trusted, inclusive and sustainable. It’s also helping to shape a more consistent and future proof approach to volunteering across the wider system. 

What’s Next? 
Over the coming months, participating practices will begin recruiting volunteers into these newly developed roles. Practices will be supported through onboarding and induction, while we begin testing what works well and capturing learning that can be shared more widely. 

We are hoping to create a new digital support pop ups in primary care using ESV (Enhanced Support Volunteer) days. Volunteers will assist patients in accessing healthcare digitally. This could include helping patients download the NHS App, log in, and navigate its features on their own devices. This support will be especially valuable for patients who may be less familiar with technology, helping to promote digital inclusion and empowering people to manage their health more independently. It’s an exciting opportunity to show how organisations can support ESV and how volunteers can provide practical, hands-on support. Improving patient access and experience, while also helping practices make the most of digital tools. 

We’ll also be opening support to other Primary Care organisations interested in hosting volunteers and continuing to develop resources, training and funding opportunities through our digital platform. 

Together with our partners across the region, we’re building a model where volunteering in Primary Care is no longer ad hoc, but a normal, valued and lasting part of care in our communities. 

We were delighted that two of our Innovations projects offered volunteering opportunities that took people outside.  

We instinctively know that nature and the outside environment play a vital role in protecting our health: Some of us were lucky enough to feel the impact of outside during covid lockdowns and knew others who weren’t so fortunate. The science agrees – spending time outside in natural environments decreases the risk for mental health conditions, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, and shows evidence of improving cognitive function. 

We also know that people who live in more deprived areas, minority ethnic groups, disabled and younger people are more likely to live in areas with less access to green spaces, so these projects were a great opportunity to connect people who might experience barriers to nature with the great outdoors.  

Care experienced young people and neuro divergent women took part in projects at an ancient woodland site, Wrongs Covert, and at Fen Zen near Downham Market, led by Break and Fen Zen.

At Fen Zen, volunteers planned and built wooden changing rooms and a compost toilet in beautiful wild meadows in Denver. At Wrongs Covert: Woodland Restoration In Norfolk, they undertook heritage land-stewardship skills such as: using traditional coppicing techniques; weaving dead hedging and screens using traditional methods; constructing and maintaining footbridges over becks; digging up clay for flooring; learning species identification and habitat sensitivity; and making co-produced conservation-led decisions for long term habitat health. 

Both projects were loved by those volunteering on them. One young person said: “I learnt about inner peace – that being outdoors is where I belong.” 

Another told us that they’d been “afraid of outside before”, but now just wanted to sign up to anything outdoors. They learnt how to recognise hazel and willow for weaving, how to cut and saw wood, how to paint fencing, and lots of transferable skills, such as how to make important decisions collaboratively.  

Co-production was a big theme for the success of both environmental projects, with dedicated time built into volunteering days for planning and decision making, and a cup of tea and some food to help keep minds and bodies on task.  his collaborative social responsibility and the reduction in the effects of loneliness and social isolation were highlighted by volunteers. They told us that they “learned a lot about working collaboratively”.

Some more quotes from the volunteers:

• “I became more aware of how to communicate my needs, respect other people’s boundaries, and adapt when plans needed to change.” 
• “The co-design process worked really well.” 
• “There was a strong feeling of shared ownership.”
• “People make friends through helping each other – long term friends.”

Several participants are staying on to volunteer outdoors at these sites.  

Meanwhile, a new six-month Innovations project, Grow Happy, has launched with Norfolk CIC Extraordinary Communities. Local families will join a county-wide project growing pollinator and butterfly friendly flowers, creating Art Trails and walkways, restoring a butterfly meadow at the UEA and helping to restore biodiversity levels.  Follow Voluntary Norfolk to keep up to date with how this is going.   

If reading this has inspired you to try an outdoors volunteering project, you could learn more with Get InVOLved Norfolk, or via Norfolk County Council’s environmental volunteering page.