Cardiff Third Sector Council is committed to supporting people to volunteer. As a part of this commitment, the Volunteer Centre team has engaged with new volunteers to understand the barriers people in Cardiff can experience when accessing volunteering opportunities. We are pleased to have had the support from some of our volunteers who have helped with translating our volunteering information leaflet into some of the most widely used community languages in Cardiff, including Farsi, Arabic, Kurdish Sorani, Ukrainian, French and Polish – with other language versions in progress.
We have been reaching out to groups in Cardiff who could use volunteering as a way of connecting in the community, learning new skills and practising their language skills. Our regular drop-in sessions at REACH+ and YMCA have enabled us to provide volunteering advice and support to people who are refugees, asylum seekers or at risk of homelessness.
In order to support people to be able to access our services in their language of choice, members of the team who speak Welsh use ‘Iaith Gwaith’ badges and lanyards to promote the use of the Welsh language, and we have all added below our email signatures “I speak… “ in the languages we can communicate in. The team at C3SC speak 14 languages.
We also work with Careers Wales to support their services and offer volunteering opportunities to people further from employment. This includes people who have been unemployed for a few years, or with additional barriers such as mental health, social anxiety or autism, with the aim of accessing volunteering as a positive step towards gaining confidence and transferable skills that will help in their search for paid employment.
