We believe that volunteers are essential to the delivery of individualized, caring, flexible literacy training to the adults in our community. Without our volunteers we would be unable to offer the personal service that many adult learners require.
The unique expertise of volunteers links us with the community at large.We seek volunteers to represent the diversity of our community, to bring new ideas and service approaches to our agency and to provide vision and objective decision-making in both administration and direct service to our learners.
Volunteers are our primary resource. Meeting their needs is a priority, second only to our mission to serve our learners.
Our agency makes every effort to provide equitable access and to find suitable learning environments for clients who seek to become learners. If, at any time during the relationship, we have any reason to believe that the learner’s training goals might not be best served with us, we reserve the right to refuse to offer service.Wherever possible we will make documented attempts to refer the individual to a more appropriate agency.
We are committed to maintaining safe work environments that respect the self-esteem and sexual dignity of all learners and paid or unpaid staff. Our agency will tolerate no unwanted comments, gestures, innuendos, contact, threats, jokes, insults or displays directed either at members of the same or the opposite sex. Any incident, sexual or other, that causes offence, humiliation, embarrassment or takes advantage of another person’s status, whether in our office or at other meeting sites in the community, will not be tolerated.
Insulting and/or abusive behaviour or language will not be tolerated in any circumstances within this agency.
As we are aware of the power of words, our agency would like to set out the following important definitions:
Position description refers to the written and binding outline which lists the full scope of duties and responsibilities assumed with a unpaid position. For paid staff, this is known as a job description.
Staff is the term for all paid employees of this organization, while personnel is a more generic term which includes anyone, paid or unpaid, who has a position or responsibility within our agency
Volunteer is the general term we use for anyone who gives their time and energy freely to support the mission of this agency.This may include board members, office help, tutors, honorary spokespersons, or fundraisers.This does not include individuals who are fulfilling other obligations through their involvement with us, whom we call “Special Case Volunteers.”While these people may be subject to the same policies and procedures as volunteers, we do not consider them to be volunteers in the true spirit of the word.