At the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 VAL were listening and talking to the VCSE sector who were asking about how could they plan financially, how could they receive any income, how could they tell people they were open or closed or had emergency supplies for anyone isolating, etc.
With that, we put together 3 brand new training programs that VAL would run online using Zoom, these were:
| Training | Number of Training Sessions | Attendees |
| Introduction to Funding – COVID19 | 7 | 100 |
| Introduction to Business Planning | 5 | 76 |
| Introduction to Social Media and Marketing | 5 | 91 |
These three sessions commenced in May 2020 and we have run these right through to the end of March 2021, initially once a month due to COVID-19 and lockdown being new to all of us and as we all adjusted to that ‘new normal’ we moved to once a quarter and these sessions have been well attended and received strong feedback.
During those lockdown periods, whilst still listening to the VCSE sector we introduced another new session, this being ‘Introduction to Income Generation’, providing insight into how organisations could introduce new income streams to assist with current and future financial progression. We ran three sessions and had over 30 attendees.
And when Boris Johnson held the press conference to highlight the roadmap to recovery VAL quickly put together a one off training session called ‘A Guide to Re-opening’ that brought together expertise, guidance and development about looking at ways that organisations could positively re-open and we had 19 organisations attend.
See all of our training
You can see all of the training we currently have available for the voluntary sector on our training page.