Can you lead and shape your community?

• inclusive and easily accessible spaces for all members, enabling you to find, meet and come together with others with a shared interest and support your development needs
• hosted on RCOT Communities, a new online community engagement platform enabling members to be part of more than one network at any time
• a place to access a wide range of activities and resources and participate in community sharing and collaboration with each other.

An integral part of our new communities is improving our approach to community leadership – those active and engaged members who choose to volunteer with us to advance both practice and the profession.

We’ve worked with our volunteers and members to understand how our historic community volunteer roles have evolved and how we can better work with and support future volunteers.

We’ve had over 200 members supporting us and working together to help us create a new approach to community volunteering and leadership so we can provide better support, integrate more development opportunities and ensure our volunteer management practices are both aligned with our values and wider best practice.

To begin with, you’ll be able to volunteer as either a Lead or a Coordinator.

Each has a defined purpose, and we’ve used the Career Development Framework (CDF), which sets out guiding principles to inform learning and development specific to occupational therapy, to build these roles.

This will make it easier for you to identify what volunteer role might be suitable and what the expectations of the roles are.

Together with our volunteers, we’ve agreed the following practice networks will be ready for you to engage with when we launch.

You can find out more at our transformation page.

This is the first step in developing our new community leadership programme and to set the foundation and shape our networks. We’ll continue to work closely with volunteers and members to understand your evolving needs and as we gain more insight, will create additional roles as and when required.

Whether you’re a seasoned volunteer or new to the experience or profession, we welcome all RCOT members to join us. These initial network lead and coordinator roles will require a commitment of around 10-12 hours each month. We’ll be adding further roles in due course that will be suitable if you have less time available.