Volunteering

Lord Freud Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. I want to draw the attention of the House to my entry in the register as a trustee of the Jecda Foundation. Over the last nine years, we have been steadily building an initiative to organise older volunteers to mentor children leaving care. We have called this initiative “Grandmentors”. It is intended to try to replicate the relationship that a grandparent would have with a youngster as they make their way to independence—finding education, housing or a job. The grandmentors support the children leaving care between the ages of 17 and their early 20s. This group represents the most vulnerable youngsters in our society. They have no hinterland of relations and nobody that they trust to talk to as they face the difficult choices involved in becoming an independent adult. That is the role of the grandmentor in our initiative. We have been working with Volunteering Matters, which I believe is the largest volunteering group in the country. Nesta also supports the initiative. We are now established in four separate local authorities and are starting up imminently in two more.

What have we learned? First, it is very hard to get to the youngsters who need the help the most. The solution that we eventually developed was to embed a worker in the social services department. Getting the right kind of money is hard. Both charitable donations and government grants can often be quite short term. For the Grandmentors project, continuity is vital. We need a three-year horizon to make sure that we do not let youngsters down just when they have found someone they can trust. Measurement of outcomes is vital. This is an area where volunteering initiatives often fall short. I am pleased to say that Volunteering Matters is making great strides.

Finally, this relationship really does seem to work. Jumping a generation means that the grandmentor is less judgmental and more supportive. We have seen some wonderful outcomes as a result. In conclusion, the paradox of volunteering is that, like anything else in the modern world, if it is to be effective it needs to be run with great professionalism.