JVN Blog

Those of you more familiar with the work of JVN will be aware that we recently spread our wings and became more involved with the Jewish communities in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Our Manchester Volunteering Champion Melissa Chapman recently wrote this article for Gesher, the newsletter for Hale Synagogue, and we thought we’d share […]

Those of you who are keen followers of JVN’s Twitter feed or fans of our Facebook page may have noticed that the volunteering efforts of certain JVN favourite have been popping up from time to time. We even mentioned him briefly in our blog about last year’s Jewish Living Expo, way back in the spring […]

I was recently at a friend’s party. I knew one person there – the hostess, who had invited me – and so I was duly forced to mingle with people I didn’t know. With everyone I met, I found myself asking the same familiar questions: “What’s your name?”, “Who do you know here?”, and the […]

JVN were honoured this week to be invited to the office of the Mayor of Barnet, Councillor Brian Schama. A member of the Jewish community – he conducts no civic events on Shabbat and other festivals – the Mayor was eager to share his views on volunteering and the Jewish community in the London Borough […]

Volunteering for a particular cause or organisation is often a way of becoming extremely passionate about it. People can go to extreme lengths in terms of the time they dedicate and, in some circumstances, the risks they take to see their vision become a reality. In this blog, JVN Intern Elliot Cukier examines just how far […]

The passing of Baroness Thatcher last week marked, for many, the end of an era, but her legacy of ‘Thatcherism’ will live on in the actions of governments and the minds of the British public for decades, possibly centuries, to come. Love her or hate her, one cannot deny that she was the woman Prime […]

Leonie and I recently wrote an article entitled Who Want to Be a Volunteer?, printed in the 2013 Charity Matters supplement in the Jewish Chronicle a few weeks ago. In this article, volunteering in schools was identified as one of the two means of volunteering that has come to the fore in recent years (the […]

Many of us who volunteer use our skills to do so. Whether we have learnt them through academia, during the course of our professional careers or simply out of life experience, the tools and talents that we have developed throughout our lives can really shine through in the world of volunteering. Whether you are a […]

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago entitled ‘What Makes A Volunteering Role Suitable’, highlighting the need to change our attitudes towards the ‘suitability’ of a candidate for a particular volunteering role. I asserted that ‘those who claim to have individual support needs should be taken on their individual merits, not as part of […]

It has been four months since the London 2012 Games ended, and one word more than others has been used to describe the vision for the future: Legacy. There was a thought, back in September, of “the Games are over: now what?” Lord Coe pledged, when presenting Britain’s bid for the Games back in 2005, […]