JVN Blog

It is no secret that in order to get the most out of people in their job, you need to find someone to fit the job description. You wouldn’t invite a history graduate to speak at a nuclear physics conference, and you wouldn’t send a fisherman to fight a fire. Why not? Because they aren’t […]

JVN’s new employee volunteering scheme, Embrace, is in full swing, with a brand new website and more and more businesses and charitiesbecoming involved. This week, the JVN team decided to put our money where our mouth is and embark on some employee volunteering of our own with GIFT. Meeting at the GIFT warehouse on Tuesday evening we helped […]

This penultimate blog post of 2012 will reflect on two major changes that will affect JVN going into the New Year, both of which have occurred within the last week. The first change sees the end of the Jubilee Hour campaign. This campaign was set up by John O’Brien and his team of staff in […]

The winter season is meant to be a time of caring, sharing and goodwill. But every so often something comes along that dampens our spirits. Looking for a bit of positive news about the charity sector’s fortunes over the last year, we turned to the Back Britain’s Charities campaign, who only two weeks ago reported […]

On 21st November, some of the female members of JVN’s staff team went to TrainE-TraidE‘s Women in the Workplace Conference in Finchley. The conference was extremely well-attended and twelve speakers, experts in their fields, led workshops on a large variety of topics, including JVN Director Leonie’s workshop entitled “Volunteering – your way back into work.” […]

And so we come to the end – our last Olympic- and Paralympic-related blog post. I hope you have enjoyed reading them and have perhaps been inspired by the stories of volunteering. Again, there are two stories this week. The first comes from Daniel Musikant, who volunteered at both sets of Games and, as you […]

Another week, another fantastic volunteering story from The Greatest Show on Earth! This week’s entry comes from Eli Benson, who works for Magen David Adom (MDA UK). Used to helping people for a living, Eli tells us how he takes the kindness learned from his job and transfers it into the world of volunteering… The […]

We believe we know and understand the notion of reciprocity: “the state of mutual dependence or influence.” However, it’s a notion that is often harder to practice. The Hebrew word Natan, which means gift, is a palindrome, spelt the same backwards and forwards. This is because giving is not just something that can positively affect […]

Hello and welcome to the first in a new series of JVN blogs entitled Volunteering Wins Gold. We’ll be posting stories about volunteering during the Olympic and Paralympic Games. We all hear about how amazing Team GB are doing (it’s impossible to ignore!), but what about the people behind the scenes? Our Jewish community has […]

Frank Weinberg, Chairman of British Friends of Israel War Disabled talked to me about his role in organising the Israeli Athletes for the Paralympic Games which takes place between 29th August and 11th September. Frank and his team’s remit is to liaise between the Israeli Paralympic Team and LOCOG and to act as a total […]