After my interest was piqued, I set up a meeting with someone at Irish Aid for today. I wanted to learn about volunteering both at home and abroad and how someone with little work experience can get involved. As I had found before, there are so many volunteering agencies out there but what Irish Aid recommend is to look into one of the 26 signatories to Comhlámh's Code of Good Practice for Volunteer Sending Organisations. Comhlámh is a company set up in 1975 by returning Irish development workers and is basically a group that facilitates the discussion and promotion of overseas development issues. They have training and courses available for people who have returned from development work and for those who consider doing that work abroad. As great as these courses may be, I generally have no interest in them. I just consider it a chance to talk to someone about their experience in development, a brief introduction to the project management tools they use such as Logframe, and a few other boring power point slides about various related topics, and of course you pay them a lot for it. I'm not convinced it could prepare you for the real world. Its a bit like entrepreneur courses. I was able to do one for free during my post grad, but there were people in there paying a lot of money for the course. It had some interesting points but not so much that you couldn't get the same value online or from a friend over a pint quite quickly and easily. I bet that very few, if any, entrepreneurs did a course on it before they were successful. What's wrong with just sending interested people with a lot of energy in to do a job, there is too much value put on training nowadays, I really think its a load of crap. I think there would be much more benefit in just doing mental and physical fitness tests before joining any company. Obviously, I have to concede that we need to send trained individuals abroad so they know exactly what they are doing, but an effort has to go in to fostering the next wave of talent so that the standard of developmental help continues to improve.

Well I was up last night thinking that I should start my own volunteering company. Inspired by the people at We've Got Time To Help, I wanted to set up a site where people with free time could lend time and energy to ongoing projects. Before I lost the run of myself I did a bit of research...Not surprisingly, such things do exist, in the form of Volunteering Ireland and Volunteer.ie. I think, these sites are great but we really need a forum so people can share their thoughts and offer help. The first thing I see on the volunteer.ie website is a big banner that says "Check out our new forum ...and share the views, interests and questions from like minded people", then the banner changes and I find out for the first time that National Volunteer Day is on the 1st of October! Well that's a bit of a coincidence! Why had I never heard of this before? Was there any media exposure? How can I get involved? So I went through the site, found a google document with all the events on today and found myself painting and moving bails of hay all day today at a local farm. It sounds strange, I live in the city, but there is actually a farm near us, and its a great place to bring the whole family.

So these things are available and it was very easy for me to get involved and lend a hand for a day. But why had I not been aware of this before? What has happened to the community spirit in this city? I'm very disappointed with the effort made by the media, I think there was some mention of it this morning on the radio, but that's a bit late for most people who may have wanted to get involved. Well, we had a fun day today, luckily we were blessed with the weather and now that I'm more aware of the volunteer work that goes on in the country, I'll be more inclined to offer as much time as I can to it from now on. Ok, I'm tired from a day's labour and it's a Friday, so I think a trip to the local public house would be the best option for me right now...