What you need to know

Some people confuse participation with volunteering. Although sometimes connected, they are very different things. Participation is the process of inclusion of refugees’ voices in policy-making and in the planning and delivery of services. Volunteering is when refugees spend their time doing something to the benefit of others. 

Although this is not always the case, participation gives more leverage to refugees if it is a paid opportunity. Volunteering, on the other hand, involves giving one’s time and effort without remuneration.

Volunteering is about being given a task to perform, whether participation is about understanding how services work and contributing to change.

Suggested actions

• It is best to design participation roles together with refugees, starting with recruitment, support mechanism and training participants.
• Provide ongoing feedback about the actions and results followed refugee contribution.

Some other procedures are standard to volunteering, for example, requiring DBS certificates from volunteers. While participant groups coming from different countries means they will need to use different processes to access their records in their home countries in order to gain a DBS certificate, in many cases this will not be straight forward or may not be possible. If DBS certificates becomes a condition for participation, it can create additional barriers. Therefore, asking character references and other risk assessment process may be sufficient for recruiting participants.