Boundaries are vitally important for your charity team

As society is becoming more and more reliant on charities to bridge the gap between what can be provided by local councils and national or international governments, it’s important to make sure that you take care of the two vital assets that your charity has, it’s staff and it’s volunteers.

Staff are frequently in organisational roles and also often working face-to-face with the people/animals/areas that you are passionate about helping. Staff come from a wide range of backgrounds, some have had experience in dealing with the various stakeholders involved, whereas others might not. Some will have established good work/life boundaries, others not.

We’ve worked with a number of teams to help them get the right balance, especially during peak times when the demand for their work is high, or the team are focussed on hitting and meeting specific targets.

How have we supported charities?

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is one example of this, as the memorial day that remembers the victims of the holocaust and other genocides including Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur is on the 27th January each year. Before the pandemic, we visited the teams offices in central london towards the end of the year to help them manage workload and also manage the delicate balance between educating the public about the horrific crimes perpetrated and manage their own healthy mental state. Visiting teams in-house is something that we regularly do, in this instance the charity invested in half day sessions over a couple of years to just help get some focus and give the teams tools to manage themselves and their workload/interpersonal communication.

We’ve worked with community charities such as BVSC and specifically with the homeless team which supports getting people off the street and into supported accommodation and ultimately into their own homes. The volunteers that we worked with were all former beneficiaries of the charities support. Formerly homeless people who’d been supported and who now wanted to give back to the charity and help speak with people in a way that would be understood. We worked with a small group of people to help them put healthy boundaries in place, manage their own energy levels and we discussed many concepts that helped them stay in a supporting guiding role.

We’ve also been involved with training teams from Action for Children; supporting their community outreach teams who are going into homes, working with parents and carers to enhance the lives of the the children they supported. This was a deeper course over a couple of days and it meant we could work on their own state, communication skills and boundaries to enable each member of the team to have easily actionable tools they could use to feel more resourced in what can be highly tricky circumstances.

Domestic abuse is another area which has unfortunately seen a rise in the reliance in charities. We’ve worked a few times with a community based team in the South of England which also runs a refuge to support their team with healthy professional boundaries. We done this with face to face workshops and during the pandemic virtual courses. Boundaries are important to them not only because of the work they do with the teams they support, but also because there are personal safety concerns from ex partners and so they need to be careful even on social media, LinkedIn etc to remain below the radar.

In June 2022, we worked with the homeless charity ‘maggs’ which runs outreach services and a day centre in Worcester/Malvern, running a whole team training session to cover the topic of Professional Boundaries and why they are essential for internal communication and respect between team members as well as for the other services and service users who they interact with on a daily basis. You can read more about the day in a recent blog. We also used the day to help reinforce and refine existing policies and standards so that everyone had the opportunity to provide input into them.

What do you need to discuss Professional Boundaries with your charity team?

We have standard elements that we discuss on all boundaries training which are key concepts to open up the minds of the team and get discussions going, the rest of the content is then bespoke to the work that you do and the concerns that you have or the challenges that you face. It would be fantastic to think that training is booked proactively, before it’s needed… but often it can be reactive in light of issues that have come up.

Charity discounts and bulk course discounts are available on the online, virtual and face to face training, so get in touch if you would like boundaries to be discussed in a thought-provoking, fun and informative way.