Season’s Greetings and best wishes for the New Year…

We wish you a healthy, happy and restful holiday season.  May the New Year shine bright for us all!

Hope you all get some well deserved rest and relaxation.

Our office will be closed from noon on December 24th and will re-open again at 8:30 a.m. on January 4, 2010.  We look forward to continuing our conversations with you then!

Sincerely,

The staff at Volunteer Victoria

Community Collaborations: One of our many valued relationships with our members…

The following is the first of many posts that we hope you will help contribute to.  As we enter 2010, and celebrate 35 years serving our community, we want to highlight the many valuable relationships we have with our members, volunteers, partners, sponsors, funders and supporters.  We invite you to join the conversation and to share your story with us.

I would like to welcome and thank Ben Ziegler, a volunteer and board member with Victoria Restorative Justice Society (VRJS), who has kindly offered to be our first guest “member” blogger to share how Volunteer Victoria assists his organization.

VRJS’s relationship with Volunteer Victoria…

Who …

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Twitter Seminar

Having done extensive research on Social Media over the past five months or so, I was somewhat reluctant to attend Margaret Hoegg’s beginner level presentation on Twitter. Contributing significantly to this reluctance was the fact that, of all the social media I had researched, Twitter seemed the least desirable to me. Margaret managed to change my mind, however, as she pointed out the very tangible benefits of Twitter.  I have since started using Twitter extensively to promote my personal blog. So, I have converted to Twitter. Let me tell you why.

The benefits of non-profit organizations’ (NPOs) use of Twitter are significant …

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What will it take to be prepared?

If you’ve lived in Victoria for any length of time, you will undoubtedly have heard people talking about “the big one.”  When will the big earthquake hit, we wonder.  And will we be prepared when the time comes?

Although it is important to plan how our organizations will react to a large full-scale earthquake, it is equally important to plan how we will react to smaller, more day-to-day emergencies.  That is the message that the Victoria Emergency Management Agency (VEMA) and the Canadian Red Cross gave to non-profit organizations the other day in our half-day workshop on ”Emergency Preparedness for Voluntary Sector Organizations.”

Facilitators Sara Walsh, Elysia Dempsey …

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Overview of Volunteer Management Course: A Participant’s Experience

Today I’d like to welcome Yasmin Rampuri from the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria who has written the following guest blog post for us about her experiences taking our recent Overview of Volunteer Management certificate course.  Congratulations to all 23 of our 2009 course graduates! 

Over four Saturdays in October and November I had the great pleasure of attending Volunteer Victoria’s excellent Overview of Volunteer Management Course.  The course was facilitated by two engaging and very experienced leaders in the Volunteer Management field, Diane Kirby and Theresa Vogel.  Each of them led two of the Saturdays, and brought their different styles to bear …

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