Become a volunteer

Please join us as a volunteer today by filling in this online form

Please note that selection as a volunteer is subject to interview, referee checks, Working with Children Check, signing our Code of Conduct & Confidentiality agreements, and completing any induction or required training. If you wish to join our Board we have additional requirements.

Key Roles we need help with include:

See below for more details or please contact us at: admin@aspergersvic.org.au

Do you want to contribute to empowering our Aspergers community? Discover the Happiness effect and see your impact through Aspergers Victoria !

Being a unique peer-led organisation, our volunteers are the heart of our organisation. Generous and passionate, Aspergers Victoria volunteers are passionate about contributing to and supporting our community. They’re not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. They like to make a difference, create change - and they do.

There are many different ways for you to get involved with Aspergers Victoria and help create a better life for Aspergers and their families/carers.

Volunteering for Aspergers Victoria offers many benefits including the "happiness"effect of giving back. You can help empower Aspergers, change their lives as well as make new friends, feel part of a bigger community and improve your experience for your CV. Aspergers Victoria also wants to make its volunteering experience as great as possible so welcomes feedback.

How is volunteering at Aspergers Victoria different?

• We are unique being a peer operated and led organisation so our volunteers become part of our family
• You are not reporting to paid staff
• You can see the impact of your support in our community
• Our volunteers are a dedicated and interesting neurodiverse team
• We are dedicated to creating an enjoyable, safe and rewarding experience for our volunteers
• We provide our volunteers with specific training, not available elsewhere
• Our volunteers have a voice and we listen through conversations, regular surveys and your advice from our consultation committee
• We celebrate our volunteer milestones and outstanding achievements
• We have volunteer events where volunteers can meet more in our community
• Many of our roles can be done remotely - you don't need to be physically in our office.

Aspergers Victoria is committed to meeting Volunteering Australia’s National Standards for Involving Volunteers and are a signatory of the Statement of Principles for the Recognition of Volunteers.

Types of volunteers

We welcome volunteers of all sorts of skills. We welcome more Aspergers and neurodiverse minds to deliver our peer support. Most of our volunteers have lived experience of Aspergers as an Asperger, Parent, carer, partner, cousin, sibling, or professionals who support our community. However you don't need lived experience to make a difference for our community. Our roles are mainly done remotely from home except for Board, Event days and Groups.

Board Roles

We welcome those with a passion to drive change for our community, as well as suitable board, governance and/or strategy experience to be on our Board, which meets monthly or bi-monthly. Our board is currently made up of volunteers with Aspergers lived experience in the roles of President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary and General Board Roles. In this role you are responsible for overseeing the legal requirements for governance of our organisation according to our Rules and legal requirements, as well as overseeing our vision and strategy.

Currently you will also have some operational deliverables as we transition our organisation to a more sustainable model with some funded support staff.

We welcome and encourage Aspergers, neurodiversity and require lived experience on our board and in all roles.

Sub committees

We have various committees you can join to contribute:

Programs committee - we have some exciting new projects underway and would welcome anyone who has the skills to assist making these projects happen including:

• Aspergers in work or with experience in work
• those experienced with supporting Aspergers at work
• those wanting to train as a coach to build our support further
• finding and educating employers about the benefits of Aspergers for their productivity
• we have a new project coming as well ...

Business Development committee - This committee organises our funding and our events across the year.

Governance & Finance committee - This committee oversees governance including budget planning, risk management and project outcomes measurement and evaluation.

Communications

We need someone to help drive our communications - including moving our newsletter to online, coordinating news content, social media and/or PR. This requires a few hours per month with lots of material available. We have a wonderful volunteer PR expert advisor to support this role.

We welcome blogs and articles contributed from our members.

Funding

We would welcome more support with our funding approach including donations, philanthropy and preparing and writing grants. Please contact us if you have any experience making funding pitches, writing grants or running funding projects.

Programs

With our Peer Groups we'd welcome:

• Peer Group Leaders - we'd love to cover more locations
• Peer Group supporters - to help organise our Peer Groups

These roles have training involved. We can forward you the role outline which ensures we maintain effective groups for our community.

Help Team

We need volunteers to help answer query emails seeking information from our community. This role takes a few hours across one week per month. For this email response service, we need volunteers with a personal connection to Aspergers, excellent written communication (in English), strong empathy and respect for confidentiality. You may be a parent with experience raising an Asperger child, or have relevant counselling or mental health training you wish to volunteer to help your community.

Admin

Paperwork waits for no-one. AV is always looking for administrative support, someone to answer groups emails, do data entry, filing and everything in between.

If you can commit to helping one day a month during office hours, we’d love to hear from you.

Technology

We need help updating and managing our website and database. It is a very simple system and no expertise is required just good technology skills and understanding. Please let us know if you can assist!

Please contact us with any queries at admin@aspergersvic.org.au