SVA Foundation Induction

SVA Board Induction

This course is designed to help new board and committee members understand the basics of how the SVA works and set you up for success.

I want to start with a personal thanks for joining the SVA. From the very first day (and the Facebook page I started after the Christchurch earthquakes) to today, my mantra is to 'make it easier for people to help others as volunteers.' Thank you for joining our team and bringing your skills, energy and passion to our organisation and the people we support.

I'm really excited to work with you and learn from you.

Sam Johnson
Founder and Chief Executive

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Welcome to the SVA (Student Volunteer Army)

SVA is about making volunteering easier - and solving problems using all our skills.

A Message From Sam, SVA Founder and CEO

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Our History

Started after the Christchurch earthquakes, the Student Volunteer Army has grown over the past 10 years to become a leading education charity in Aotearoa focused on providing meaningful volunteer engagement and opportunities for students.

2010 : SVA Founded

SVA was born from a Facebook page started by Sam Johnson, a then University of Canterbury student, in response to the September 2010 Christchurch earthquake. A couple of days after the natural disaster, Sam invited 200 of his friends an event he started called the "Student Base for Earthquake Clean up" which was designed to help locals with non-lifesaving tasks such as soil liquefaction clean up.
This event grew to have over 2500 volunteers who chipped in for the clean up of Christchurch over the following weeks. To keep the momentum going after the success of their event, Sam and other key organisers teamed up with the University of Canterbury Students Association to form the Student Volunteer Army as we know it today - a club on campus to make helping others easy.
2011 : Response to the 2011 Earthquake

The February earthquake was much more devastating and the SVA once again rallied to help their community who were hit by widespread liquefaction. There were 70 core organisers who with support from business, residents Civil Defence worked to clean up the streets of Christchurch. SVA saw the mass deployment of volunteers to the worst affected areas, had volunteers responding to requests from individuals that came through the call centre or website and aided with management of volunteers for other organisations.
At its peak, this emergency response saw up to 13,000 students volunteering each week. This lay the foundations for SVA's future for not only emergency response but for a culture of students wanting to make a difference in their communities.
2011 - 2020 : Lending a Hand

Over the years, SVA put their experience to work and assisted with other major events in Aotearoa including the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, the 2017 Port Hills fires, the Christchurch mosque shootings as well as other natural disasters. What we do is mobilise people in a crisis; but there is no magic. It takes hard work, great communications, media help, long hours and many, many phone calls.

The SVA ethos has always been to say yes, respond quickly and put the welfare of our volunteers first.
2020 : Covid-19 Responsee

When the Covid-19 pandemic landed in New Zealand, SVA was well equipped to help out where necessary.

The Grocery Delivery service was built and launched to enable vulnerable people to have safe, fast and affordable delivery of food and our fantastic volunteers always ensure a positive and friendly service. Our volunteers have also been a great support in vaccination clinics helping our health professionals and to help everything run smoothly.
2021 Onwards

When we're not delivering groceries or helping at vaccination centres during the Covid-19 pandemic, you'll find us in schools and universities across Aotearoa working with students and lending a hand to important initiatives. At SVA, we're all about creating purposeful volunteer opportunities for young people to show them that they can be the change they want to see in their communities. We need all hands on deck and are glad to have you on board!

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The Big Picture

Vision

All ākonga value takoha and engage in volunteering at each stage of their education.

Purpose

Support ākonga to improve their lives, the lives of others and the taiao (world around them)

Values

Be kaitiaki, have courage, trust others, stay youthful, do the mahi

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System Outcomes we are seeking

Aotearoa has a thriving network of SVA clubs at secondary schools and tertiary institutions that make a direct positive difference to their communities.
That ākonga are supported with the training and tools to understand, develop further and reflect on their service and hauora in a local and global context.
That helping others and your community is straightforward; enabled by easy models and great technology which anyone can utilise to connect with others the way they hope to.
That the Student Volunteer Army is a financially sustainable enterprise that can consistently develop student volunteering capacity.

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Organisational Priorities

Te Tiriti Based: Embrace te ao Māori by journeying our work and network to be Te Tiriti honouring.
Local & Responsive: Be community oriented, have a focus on environmental action and be ready to assist in crisis when usual service delivery is overwhelmed.
Financially Sustainable: Seek to build the kete of SVA to be able to support its self through social enterprise and great partnerships.
Be a Home: Model inclusivity and wellbeing within our netowrk by focusing on volunteer, staff and board hauora and personal excellence.

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Our mission, and yours, is to take SVA from a 'good' organisation to a 'great' one."

- Dr Paul Reynolds QSO, Chairman of the board.

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Our Programmes

SVA is focused on creating a pipeline of future volunteers who have the skills and abilities to contribute to the community sector. Over the past year we have been successful in training a new cohort of volunteers who have been able to collaborate with individuals and organisations to assist with worthwhile projects and address the challenges and needs in their local community through being a volunteer at primary, secondary and tertiary levels.

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SVA Schools (Primary)

A primary school focused teaching resource used to teach project management skills to students.

SVA Schools supported 24,000 primary aged students from 750 classrooms in every region of New Zealand to learn the principles of volunteering and undertake a volunteering project in a local park, waterway or other community location in the past year. Teachers receive a free resource kit and journey their students through the process of finding a project, building a team and a plan, and making that project happen. This process is core to all parts of SVA and was based on how the UC SVA Club operates.

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SVA Service Award (Secondary)

A five level badge based system designed to recognise the volunteer efforts of students.

Through the SVA Service Award, our five-level badge based system that records student volunteering and assists students to use their service hours to advance their career, we have recognised students and supported deeper community engagement from their school. 245 secondary schools of every decile level across New Zealand are engaged in the programme which means over one third of all NZ secondary schools are already part of SVA.

Students recorded their volunteering to the UN Sustainable Development goals. The most hours were contributed towards goal #3 Good Health and Wellbeing (36,000 actions) and the second-highest was Quality Education (27,855 actions). Many of our volunteers in crisis times are pulled from our network of secondary students.

We work with School Kit to deliver this programme. Emma (Wellington) and Kylie (Hamilton) own and operate an incredible company called School Kit. SVA wouldn't be where it was without these two. We contract School Kit to talk to teachers on our behalf. Their teammate, Cat (Hamilton), is who we often deal with.
We chat with School Kit via Basecamp.

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SVA Clubs

Tertiary based clubs where student execs create and operate volunteer projects for their peers.

We have expanded from having one SVA club at the University of Canterbury to having six clubs operating around New Zealand at Otago, Lincoln, Ara, Victoria, and Auckland.

Clubs operate with their own independent exec team of students who lead their club. Clubs use the SVA app and infrastructure to operate their projects. Each of the clubs, depending on their size, run 2-4 ‘Big’ events and fortnightly/ monthly smaller ‘Platoon’ projects.

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SVA General

Over the years SVA now also provides opportunities for adults to volunteer. Everything from response projects to ways to get involved with other charity organisations, there is plenty to get involved in.

Link for Request Form here

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SVA Communities

We also work with a range of organisations to help them get volunteers We talk them through listing on our app, managing their projects and more. An example of this is the Red Cross with the Meals on Wheels programme.

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SVA's model is low touch, high scale. We design and deliver programmes that get young people volunteering in their local context.

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Governance and Admin

Student Volunteer Army is a registered New Zealand based charitable Trust. We are governed by a professional board of directors, chaired by Dr Paul Reynolds QSO. A student representative also sits on SVA's board.

Click through to our website to check out the team

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Board Processes

We use Board Pro as the tool to securely manage and distribute board documents. Sam J will set you up with a username and password. Board papers are emailed ~5 days in advance of the meeting (if not 7 days) and can be downloaded from within Board Pro.

Here is the link to Log in

SVA Board meetings are usually 2-3 hours long and take place on an afternoon, usually later in the week. We aim to have as many meetings in person as possible for quality strategic discussion with zoom meetings in between times.

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Financials and Resolutions

SVA is banked with Kiwibank. If you require access to the banking, you will need to go Kiwibank and ask to be verified and get a customer number which will enable us to add you to our banking system (if appropriate).

Our account details are:
Student Volunteer Army Foundation
38-9012-0891569-00
Kiwibank

As a charity, we often pass resolutions by email for grant applications. Funders prefer a separate and clean email chain for their grant (rather than a single email with many resolutions). Funders often ask for the whole email chain to be forwarded to them.
Please reply all to the email from myself, Madi Keay or Nigel Georgieff (contract grant writer) when you receive these.

As a matter of good practice, we do ask all our board members to make a small donation to SVA each year which assists us when we talk to donors about the board. This is especially important with donors more familiar with the US context. We're really after your skills, not your money, so the amount can be nominal :)

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Policies

Please see the link below to SVA's current organisational policies. These are currently being reviewed as part of seeking a) MSD Social Sector Accreditation and b) Achieving ISO 27001 certification (an internationally recognised specification for Information Security Management Systems). Comments are welcome to be added directly to areas you think need further reflection/ work or please feel free to share thoughts with Sam.

Find our policies here

Please see the link below to SVA's current risk matrix. This is updated regularly and presented to board meetings.

Risk Matrix

Find our brand guidelines below. This was recently worked on and refreshed.

Check out our brand guidelines

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Technology Stack

We use a lot of different systems and so please have a look at them and ask lots of questions.

We will arrange a time to give you an overview of our app and admin portal; our main tool.

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Ontraport

While the above tools are important, we are almost religious about Ontraport. It's our CRM, website page builder and automated email marketing tool all in one. Please watch the below video to get a basic understanding.

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