Help for non profit organisation

Hm71

Good morning, I help run a nonprofit organisation & we have received some funding for 8 courses to benefit our members. We feel we should have an application form with t&C's to stop anyone getting the finding & either not completing the course or leaving the club once the qualification is achieved. Does anyone know where I could get some help with preparing such a form please?

Savvy_Sue

Google 'volunteer' plus your town / city / county and find your local volunteer support group. See what help and support is available there. 

Or if there's a national or larger less local organisation doing similar to you, see if you can get some help there. 

However, I can foresee a few difficulties. For example, you talk about 'not completing the course' - there might be all sorts of reasons why people would be unable to do this. Or 'leaving the club' - there would obviously need to be a timescale on this, but you can't FORCE people to keep being involved. 

When someone is employed, and the employer is paying for training, it's relatively easy: they get the employee to sign to say they will repay the cost of the training if they leave within a certain time period. And they can just deduct costs from the final salary if necessary. It's a bit trickier with volunteers. 

And I have seen it happen locally: there was a new instructor in a fitness group I'm involved in who was a bit 'different'. After a while they weren't working with that group any more, but they set up a similarly named group in the same area. The difference was I'm fairly sure they'd paid for their own training. Apparently they'd done something similar at another group a few years earlier: trained, started instructing, swanned off and did their own thing. In both cases they took some of the regulars with them. 

You may have to settle for "if we pay for you to take this training, we expect that you will ..."

One thought though: what do Citizens Advice do with their volunteers?

Mistral001

I agree with the above.  Also, before deciding to put any term or condition upon the volunteer, you need to be prepared to take that person to court, should they breach that term and condition.  If ultimately you are not prepared to do that, then that T or C is worthless.