JVN Blog

There is a famous saying about #volunteers: “Volunteers are worthless not because they are no good but,  because the work they do is impossible to cost out – its priceless.” Traditionally, most people volunteer because they will be making a difference to the lives of others, while also generating benefits for themselves – greater confidence, […]

You know those little things that make your day. Those simple tasks that go smoothly, a smile, a nice gesture… They just seem to make such a big difference. Life is in the little details. Ongoing small gestures can mean so much more than one grand display of love. Simple everyday tasks throughout the week/month […]

#Microvolunteering This year JVN will be adding a bit of a twist to their #YoniJesner Awards. We won’t just be celebrating volunteering that night but we’ll be doing some too!  We believe that, if all participants join in, this will be the single largest ever instance of volunteering in one location in the Jewish community! […]

So, it’s small charity week and we decided to lend our support to the countless small charities out there by examining how difficult it is for them to make the impact and difference they want. There are 180,000 registered charities in England and Wales, all of which are recorded on the online register of charities. […]

This year as in the past few years, the national Volunteers’ Week coincides directly with the Jewish Festival of Shavuot. This gives us at JVN an opportunity to link the valuable contribution volunteers make to our community with the festival of chessed (kindness).  But this year, we have an added significance – it’s the 30th anniversary […]

#Charities & #SocialMedia DO mix  Charities often struggle when it comes to marketing – they either need a wealthy benefactor to fund it, be a household name so donations can be syphoned off to different budgets, or to rely on a partnership or two with well-known brands that will tell their story for them. Social […]

I was talking to a friend recently about life and work and we both agreed that there are too many people stuck in a job they don’t like. This is a real shame. Life is full of unexpected twists and turns and it is a waste spending years, months, even days doing something which you […]

In one of our past blog posts, we talked about how many university students struggle with building the best possible CVs. This leads many of them to view volunteering as a requirement, or even a chore, that they need to do in order to because there is so much demand for paid starter-level jobs, or […]

A refrain made popular by the Beatles was surely meant for the Festival of Chanukah! Of course a week has seven days, but Chanukah is about the extraordinary; the miracle of a small container of oil that burned beyond its one day lifespan for an additional week. The number eight is itself an extraordinary number […]

  Here’s an uncontroversial statement: educating young people is extremely important. Academic success is at the forefront of government policy and many parents’ minds, and this has been the case as far as we can remember. But academia, nowadays, has an educational rival. Citizenship and so-called informal education has an established place on the National […]