Harrogate & Area Council for Voluntary Service

Harrogate and Area Volunteer Centre works hard to promote volunteering across the district. We promote the concept of volunteering as a whole, and promote the Volunteer Centre as a "one stop shop" for people who wish to find out about all the different opportunities there are to be involved in their community.

We do not directly recruit volunteers for the Volunteer Centre, so all the marketing that we do benefits you, as we signpost people to organisations that best suit them. To find out more about this process, please visit our brokerage page. We currently have over 180 different organisations registered with the Volunteer Centre, and we hold information on all the opportunities that they have for people to volunteer. We currently have around 370 different opportunities for people to volunteer.

We carry out our marketing via a variety of media - local press and radio, social networking, attendance at events, giving presentations, leaflet distribution and displays in public areas. Should you need help or advice on using any of these media for your own marketing, please contact us.

When an organisation registers with the Volunteer Centre, we ask them to complete some forms which then in turn feed our promotional material. We promote your opportunities via the following:

• All opportunities are entered onto our own internal database, called V-base. This then links into the national volunteering database - http://www.do-it.org/. Unless you specifically request otherwise, your opportunities will appear on do-it.org, with your contact details. You may request that the Volunteer Centre is the point of contact for your organisation, and we will then forward on any enquiries you may receive - however we recommend that your own contact details make the process much easier for the volunteer!
• The opportunities from our database then also inform our "Green Booklet", which we give to all people who enquire. This is a brief, alphabetical listing of all the organisations registered with us, and gives people an idea of the kind of things that they can do. Please click here to see the latest copy. We produce a similar booklet for under 18's, and the information here is taken from your registration forms when there is the opportunity to indicate whether your volunteering opportunities are suitable for people under 18.
• We then also produce specialist listings, which are grouped around areas of interest - so for example the environment, technology, older people, children etc. We give these to people when we have identified an area they may be interested in volunteering in, and these listings give them brief details about each opportunity you have. Please click here to see an example listing.
• We also put the above information on this website, and have a link to our "most recent vacancies" - those that are brand new in or desperate for volunteers.
• In addition, we run a weekly feature in the Harrogate Advertiser series, called "Why I Love to Help" which gives different organisations the chance to tell us a little about their organisation through their volunteers. If you would like to see your organisation featured, please click here to contact us.

Come and connect with us on Facebook -

Harrogate Volunteer Centre

Or come and tweet with us on Twitter -

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Your Contact at the Volunteer Centre:

Caroline Shead

Volunteer Centre Manager
Harrogate & Area Volunteer Centre
Community House
46-50 East Parade
Harrogate HG1 5RR

Tel: 01423 509004
Fax: 01423 502126
e-mail: volunteer@harrogate.org