I have a few. I want to reiterate what Mr. Trethowan said. As an organisation, Business in the Community is working fine. We are funded through corporate membership and we are not looking for money or for Government to get involved with what we do.
When I started three years ago I thought the difficult thing would be to get businesses to get involved, but the will is there. The problem is that every time a business goes to the local area and says it would like to get involved, the community sector says thanks very much and looks for money. When the business says it is not talking about money and asks how it can provide the help they need the answer is again about money. We say "no" and ask for what do they want the money. The reply is often that they want to buy in a consultant to do a marketing plan for them. We ask would they like a marketing director to help them and they ask why they would do that. That process goes on continually. What we are trying to get across to the community sector is that not only do they get the benefit of the skill but they get the benefit of the individual's network because that follows. It is a cultural exchange because what the business people give they also get back from the community sector.
As an organisation we are just concerned with one area - employer-supported volunteering. The reason we are here is to lobby the committee on the Tipping the Balance report which took two years to put together. That two years looked at all the issues surrounding volunteering in Ireland. As was mentioned by Senator Ó Murchú, "volunteering" is a word that does not sit easily with everybody in the country. Volunteers are not a race of individuals but just people out there.
The Tipping the Balance report impacts on all the issues concerning volunteering. A significant number of issues were brought up but I want to reiterate the policy issues we are talking about. We are talking about supporting volunteering, about regulating and protecting volunteering, about police checks, insurance and all those issues. We are talking about developing and promoting volunteering such as raising the profile and getting more people involved. We are talking about addressing the barriers to volunteering such as the fact that working life has changed in Ireland. There has been a huge change in the face of work but the volunteer using organisations have not kept up with that change.
Volunteers are everybody. They are people who are in employment, people employed in the home, people not in regular employment, people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and people from everywhere across the board. What a lot of community and voluntary organisations forget is that they need to adapt their policies around involving volunteers in order to suit those changing areas. We are talking about targeting volunteers and about getting particular types of people involved, whether employers, employees or those other groups I mentioned. We are also talking about profiling the image of volunteering.
I want to point out a table on page 93 in the report. This page shows a table that examines six different countries across Europe. It looks at whether they have a policy development in place and whether they have an infrastructure to support volunteering. If they have an infrastructure it looks at how many per head of population support the infrastructure. As can be seen Ireland does not rate very well there.
With us today as members of the task force on community involvement in Business in the Community we have Sandra Velthuis from Volunteering Ireland and Tricia Nolan from the Tallaght Volunteer Bureau. They are experts in the field of volunteering across the board. I can only speak from the employer-supported volunteering side but they were also members, as I was, of the National Committee on Volunteering and they put a huge amount of information forward. The issue of the declining numbers of volunteers was raised yet I know that both of them have large numbers on their current registers. I was at a conference in Galway where one of the staff of Volunteering Ireland spoke and it currently has 200 individuals on its books seeking volunteering opportunities. These volunteers are not coming through us but are just people who have come forward to access the service. Again, the problem is accessing the opportunities for them.
Both of those organisations work with developing community organisations in adopting best practice. Volunteering Ireland has developed a volunteering charter. It is a charter of rights which provides that the volunteer can expect to be treated in such a manner within an organisation and that an organisation can expect the volunteer to treat it in such a way. It has been adopted nationally at this stage. A question was asked earlier about elements within the policy I have just mentioned and whether there was best practice. The answer is "yes". There is significant best practice but it is ad hoc. It needs to be drawn together so that a greater impact can be made on the sector. I just mention Nell Kavanagh who co-ordinates the Bank of Ireland programme in Cabinteely
The types of projects different companies get involved in are wide ranging. As an organisation Business in the Community works within the company. We work only within the company to assist it to put the policies, practices and budget together to support it. What we do is hand-hold them to make the connections within the community but ultimately we walk away. Our objective is to make ourselves redundant with those companies so that they then create their own networks and context. That is where the difficulty is. As John said, there is a supply side going forward but the demand is not doing so. The demand side asks why the business wants to get involved and why it is not giving money. It cannot get around that mindset.
I reiterate what Bank of Ireland is doing in Cabinteely Here again we are just talking about people and not money. Individuals are not only going forward giving business skills. Also, four times during the year they get a wide-ranging group of 30 to 40 staff members, from director level right down to cleaners and gardeners, and they go out and completely regenerate a project in one day. One of the first ones they did was in Cabinteely community college where they planted a seeing garden for children with sight problems who were in school. They did that in one day. It was a challenge like one of those real life television programmes and was very successful.
Trying to find that opportunity is extremely difficult. One might think that people would queue up for that help but they do not. Our role is therefore difficult because we must try not just to work with the business but to capacity build in the community which is not our role.
We are here today to say that all the answers are in the report Tipping the Balance. I know this because I worked on the sub-committee which put the report together. It is currently with the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. We have written to all the Ministers who have all said it is under consideration. I know there have been two parliamentary questions asked. Hopefully, what we are trying to do today is to spur further movement on the policy development side. We are saying that maybe funding might be difficult to access but asking that we start the policy development now because it is needed.