Case study - Inspiring Scotland

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As a venture philanthropy organisation supporting the voluntary sector to address deep-rooted social problems in Scotland, Inspiring Scotland supports over 300 charities across different portfolios through 13 managed funds. One of the programmes funded by the Scottish Government, intandem, matches volunteer mentors with young people between the ages of eight and fourteen who are looked after at home because of various challenges in their life.

Debbie Zima, a performance advisor at Inspiring Scotland who supports intandem says that right at the beginning of lockdown they swiftly changed the delivery of their face to face mentoring service to a mixture of online, phone and text. ‘We needed to quickly develop an online solution for volunteer recruitment and training of mentors to make sure we had a steady supply of people ready for the future so we asked the Scottish Tech Army for help.’

Tolis Savvas, a project manager with the Scottish Tech Army, was assigned to the project and went away and researched potential solutions for intandem. ‘To start with we looked at using a specific tool like Google but in the end we expanded the functionality of intandem’s existing platform with an online learning tool to combine online training materials with a knowledge-based inventory. Intandem ended up delivering everything themselves and my involvement was mainly advisory; coming up with design solutions and managing the project to keep them on track. This meant that there was no outlay or ongoing costs for the organisation so it was a win, win situation.’

Originally from Thessaloniki, Tolis was one of the STA’s early recruits. ‘I’m not one of those people who can just sit around on their hands. During lockdown I had my day job as a transformational lead at Tesco Bank and was completing an MBA but I also wanted to support the Scottish Tech Army. The Inspiring Scotland project has been great to work on and it took just two and a half months end to end which usually doesn’t happen in the real world.’

Debbie says that Tolis was brilliant at keeping everyone in the team on the same page and that the new online set up will make a significant difference to their intandem programme. ‘It offers our 12 partner charities volunteer mentor training modules that can be used online or in a blended model alongside face to face meetings. They can also use these modules to recruit and train intandem mentors to meet the needs of our looked after at home young people. Having a portal that consolidates all of intandem in the one place is something we’ve never had before and is just magic.’

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