Building a Caring Singapore, One VM at a time

Volunteer Management Circuit (Generation 3)
It’s a wrap!
We are indeed honoured to be able to witness the graduation of yet another generation of Volunteer Management professionals (VMs) last Friday. To date, the Circuit, part of the SG Cares movement, has trained and equipped close to 70 VMs across many Social Service Agencies (SSAs).
Over 4 weeks in October 2019, participants of the Volunteer Management Circuit (Generation 3)
- learned key principles to be successful in their roles as VMs,
- picked up essential VM skills and soft-skills,
- heard and exchanged ideas with other VMs,
- took the opportunity afforded by the Circuit to process and think through how their volunteer programmes can be levelled up, and
- built a community of practitioners they can be part of and seek support from, even after the circuit.
Participants, across the board, reported that the circuit positively and significantly impacted their volunteer management knowledge, beliefs, skills and professional development.
We were also glad to have Dr Andrew Lim, Director of Volunteer Resource Optimisation, NCSS gracing the last day of the Circuit to address the participants. He shared the various NCSS resources and developments to help SSAs further level up their volunteer partnerships and peppered it with insightful anecdotes to help VMs understand the strategic roles they play in resourcing SSAs for their missions. Towards the end of the day, he personally presented the graduation certificates to the graduates.
This run of the VM Circuit also saw the launch of the VM Buddy System, where we matched buddies from the VM Circuit Generation 3 with VMs from the Pioneer and 2nd Generation. We hope this will create a closely knitted community of VMs to work with and support each other.
With yet another generation of VMs graduating, we are indeed excited to see how volunteer partnerships will level up and help SSAs to sustainably reach more, do more and impact more, as they build a more caring society.
Keen to have us level up your volunteer partnerships and programmes? Find out more and consider our various solutions.

James is the Lead Thrive-Synergist & Founder of Emmaus Strategies; a social enterprise that “fuels good”. It does this through Mental Well-Being programmes for individuals and organizations, as well as Strategic Volunteer Partnerships consultancy and training for non-profits.