Dame Tanni Grey-Thomspon, the UK’s best-known Paralympic athlete and an Open University honorary graduate, spends one day a week on community and voluntary projects. So what tips does she have on volunteering?
“The difficulty is, people like the idea of volunteering but sometimes don’t know what they want to do or how to go about getting started. I’m a trustee of a charity called V which is about inspiring the young to become volunteers but that’s just one part of it; it’s about giving people ideas on what they want to do, as volunteering gives you new skills and can be very useful.
“If you want to volunteer you have to be quite persistent. Lots of organisations are not as welcoming to volunteers as they should be; it works both ways - organisations need to be better at dealing with volunteers and volunteers need to be quite persistent in offering their help.
“London 2012 gives people a great opportunity to volunteer. I sit on a diversity group where we’re looking at how you make the workforce more diverse as we want to attract people from all over the world from every background going to watch and participate, and you can’t do that unless you have a diverse workforce and diverse volunteers. The aim is to get as many disabled people as possible to volunteer at 2012.
“I hope that by seeing disabled people on the street wearing a volunteer’s uniform it will start to change people’s attitude to disability. When I was growing up you didn’t see many disabled people in the city centre, they were in homes and special schools and behind closed doors. With lots of disabled volunteers, 2012 can improve the public’s perception of disability.
“I think people don’t always understand what volunteering is, it doesn’t have to be 20 hours a week, it could just be a couple of hours in a year. It’s finding the right thing that makes them feel good about it so they hopefully do more, rather than feeling like they’re being used. The best way is to start small, don’t commit yourself to a massive volunteering project because if you don’t like it you’ll have a miserable time.”