Volunteer duty

It’s important to stay safe as a volunteer, regardless of the organisation you’re working for, or the work that you’re doing, because your actions can have a flow on effect to fellow volunteers, staff, the organisation, the clients, and community that it serves.

And this lesson gives you some background on what your responsibilities are. The duty to be safe differs, depending on the organisation you’re volunteering for and the activity you’re doing. If the organisation you volunteer for employees anyone to carry out paid work, both you as a volunteer and the organisation you work for are covered under the workplace health and safety act, and of course you have responsibilities under that act, so you need to know about how those laws apply in your role. 

The organisation hopefully will have a risk management plan, and they’ll be able to tell you the types of risks that are in your role and how to watch out for those. Now workplace health and safety is an interesting one, because there are different laws in each state. Some states have joined together under what they call the harmonised laws across Australia. So the harmonised laws state that if you are a volunteer with paid employees, then as a volunteer, you’re under the workplace health and safety act, but the harmonised laws also state that if you’re a volunteer and there’s no employees, so for example, it might be a sporting club with no employees, and it’s just made up of all volunteers, then you’re actually regarded as a volunteer association. 

So the organisation and volunteers aren’t covered under the workplace health and safety act, and you don’t have work health and safety duties under the act, but you still need to make sure that you take care to carry out your volunteer tasks in a safe way. You still need to make sure that you’re not negligent, that you’re considering others, and making sure that everybody’s safe. So just because under the act under the harmonised laws for Australia as a volunteer organisation, you’re not covered under the act, make sure that you still work safely. So staying safe. If the activity you’re doing is purely domestic, social, recreational, or private in nature, it wouldn’t necessarily be considered as work, but if the activity would usually be a paid one and you’re doing it voluntarily, then it may also be regarded as work. 

Look, the critical thing here is to know that everybody has a responsibility to others they’re working with and to the people they’re serving to stay safe and to make sure that you do as much as possible to ensure that you’re working safely.