“The challenge is not simply recruiting volunteers. It is investing in them, supporting them through the relentlessness of advice work, and giving experienced volunteers reasons to stay.”
*Sarah has volunteered with our advice centre for six years following a highly experienced public-sector career. She was accustomed to being the person others turned to when something went wrong – someone who knew her field and could usually find a way through even the most difficult situation.
Becoming an advice volunteer was initially, unexpectedly, uncomfortable. She brought considerable professional and life experience, but she did not know the benefits system. She was acutely conscious of what she did not know and worried that this meant she would not be helpful enough to residents.
Six years later, what has developed is much more than knowledge of benefits, debt or advice processes.
Expertise in advice work accumulates slowly. It comes from seeing how apparently similar problems turn out to be different; discovering which extra question changes your understanding of a case; getting something checked and understanding why; seeing what happens when a particular approach works – and when it does not. Gradually, individual pieces of knowledge become an overall understanding and natural insight.
*Sarah no longer needs the security of knowing everything before she can be useful. She knows how to find out what needs attention first, what can wait, when another issue may be hiding underneath the presenting problem and when she needs someone else’s expertise. Perhaps most importantly, she has learnt that finding a way forward with somebody is different from finding it for them.
One debt client brought that distinction sharply into focus. Following a bereavement, he was overwhelmed. He was facing serious housing costs alongside other priority and non-priority debts and knew that significant changes might be needed to make his situation sustainable. But he could not see the wood for the trees or decide what to do first.
*Sarah could see the priorities. The harder task was helping the client see them too.
*Sarah broke an overwhelming situation into achievable steps: tackle one small area of the home; identify something that could be sold to create some money and space, read the meters, set up the agreed token payment with one supportive creditor, put the opened letters in date order. Yet week after week he returned with many of the same worries and little progress. On one occasion the agreed priorities remained untouched, although he reported that he had restrung two guitars and started to build a cabinet.
Six years earlier, Sarah’s frustration had come from not knowing what to do. Now she faced a different frustration: knowing what could help but being unable to make another person do it.
That is part of the emotional burden of experienced advice work. Different residents bring different lives, but advisors repeatedly encounter inadequate incomes, deficit budgets, flawed systems, stalled engagement and circumstances in which there may simply be no good solution. Experience makes an advisor better equipped to respond, but it also means they have seen the pattern many times before.
The challenge and task are still to meet the next resident with curiosity rather than assumption or judgement and with patience and empathy rather than the accumulated frustration of all the cases that came before.
Supporting and retaining an experienced volunteer therefore requires more than keeping their technical knowledge up to date. They need somewhere where they do not have to be endlessly patient; where frustration can be expressed without judgement; where a difficult case can be thought about rather than simply carried; and where someone can help distinguish between what belongs to the advisor and what must remain the client’s responsibility.
It also means protecting experienced volunteers from the consequences of their own competence. The more reliable someone becomes, the easier it is for a busy service to rely on them more. Support sometimes means recognising when enough is enough, not simply asking whether they could take one more case.
That support helps restore perspective and makes it possible to return to the next resident with empathy intact. Belonging matters too: knowing that difficult work is shared, that contribution is noticed, and that the volunteer is valued as a person rather than simply as capacity.
If *Sarah left, we would lose far more than her volunteering hours. We would lose six years of accumulated knowledge and, more importantly, six years of insight. Our loss would be a significant loss to residents in need.
*Sarah’s journey also illustrates a less visible workforce challenge. At the beginning, she needed support because she did not yet know enough. Six years later, she needs support partly because she knows so much about how difficult these problems can be.
Investment in the advice workforce is needed at both points – to turn knowledge into expertise
and to sustain the people who have acquired it
*Names and some identifying details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.
