I will talk about volunteers first, before I move on to what we need next.
Volunteers represent a very interesting question. As you are aware, we were given a large number of Ready Scotland volunteers. To be honest, there is very little for them to do. Our community councils and other front-line organisations have been fantastic, and they already had a large number of volunteers. Our existing voluntary organisations that use volunteers have begun a process of changing their work to digital stuff—phoning people and doing online work with existing clients, for example. That is working surprisingly well—certainly, with adults. It is much more difficult to offer online support for young people and children. We are looking at the possibility of organisations doing activities outdoors, which would be slightly less risky.
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However, I absolutely agree that we have to harness all the people who offered their time but whose offers we were unable to take up. I cannot think of anything worse than offering your time but being told that it is not needed at that moment. We do need it; we are going to need it in the future, so we have to come up with ways of involving people. We are working very hard on that across the sector.
Foundation Scotland, which is one of the funders, recently published an evaluation of its three Rs—response, recovery and resilience—fund. It made recommendations for the future, and was absolutely spot-on about what we need, which is
“core funding and capacity building”
for organisations. It also said that we need to tackle poverty and inequality, which have obviously risen as a result of the crisis, and that we need to support mental health projects—which we have all reported as being a huge issue—and to support organisations to
“adjust to a ‘new normal’”.
It is not as simple as being just about recovery; it is about renewal. We are not going back to what we were; we are moving to a new model and we do not know 100 per cent what that will be. We need to collaborate more than ever before.
We need to harness the things that have worked really well. For example, just about the entire population has upskilled itself on using things like Zoom and Houseparty. The tolerance for communicating over the internet has increased. Volunteers would be much more receptive now than they would have been six months ago if I were to suggest that they do a face-to-face WhatsApp call, rather than trekking all the way to the office. That is good for people because it saves time, and it is good for the environment because people are not getting in their cars to drive to see me.
Those are my wishes.