As the team who work daily to place BBC staff as volunteers with charity partners, we know all too well that the "V" word can sometimes be misunderstood. Occasionally seen as a dusty, worthy word, it can conjure images of coffee mornings and bric-a-brac stalls. So its not always as easy as you might think to get people to embrace their inner-volunteer. That’s why the Connect & Create team try hard to make our opportunities as vibrant and exciting as possible, and today's post is to tell you about one such project.

One day last summer Paul Corcoran of Connect & Create team beamed as he put forward his idea for a new project with our charity partner, Fairbridge. All we knew was that it involved a ship!  As Paul outlined his idea, he explained that the charity, who work to give life skills to disadvantaged young people across the UK, had an exciting way of teaching the young people about team-work by placing them as crew for a week on a 92 foot tall ship, The Spirit of Fairbridge" moored off the coast of Oban.

Its not unusual for some the young people who qualify for this experience to turn it down, as the idea of crewing a tall ship is so far outside their realm of their experience and fear of the unknown can put them off. So Paul's idea was to make them a film for all at Fairbridge to see, tracking the experience of some of the young people aboard a 7-day sail in October.

We had no trouble finding the inner-volunteer among BBC staff for this one. Inundated with offers, Paul selected four staff who would benefit by bringing the learnings of the experience back into their day job. Ed Horne, who applied to gain skills to enhance his video edit career, said “The rain, cold and wind could not have been worse to film onboard. It was a brilliant opportunity to prepare us for what we may have to deal with on future programmes”.

"The Spirit" is the jewel in the crown of Fairbridge, bringing together hundreds of disadvantaged young people each year to learn to sail. The challenge for the BBC volunteers was to shoot and edit a film that told the story of young people living onboard and sailing for the first time, in the hope that the film might help persuade other young people to take the challenge.

The final film is now being sent to all Fairbridge centres across the UK where it will be seen by over 5000 young people in the first year.  The skipper of The Spirit, Mike Strang, was delighted with the film "This is such a valuable resource for staff and centres to use.  We have never had anything like this that captures everything positive about the whole experience of life on board Spirit. It will help to inspire so many young people to challenge themselves in new and exciting ways".

Hopefully it may also help others to see that volunteering can be one of the most thrilling and meaningful ways of connecting with other people.

Glynn Ryland is the Manager of BBC Connect & Create

Like many jobs in media, journalism can be difficult to break into, especially for young people who don’t have the advantage of having 'a foot in the door' of the industry. That's why the BBC's Connect & Create programme runs Step Up, an annual scheme that supports budding journalists by giving them skills in news production, right in the heart of BBC newsrooms. The scheme runs in London and Glasgow and just launched in Manchester at the end of last year. 

The aim is simple: Give 15 trainees the skills they need to find and report news stories from their own local communities. Then support them as they do this in a professional news environment. The result is a network of community journalists who can take their skills on with them into other journalistic work, whether that’s with the BBC, with other broadcasters or with local community news projects.

The Connect & Create team love running Step Up, not just because of the insightful stories that the Step Up-ers manage to find, but because of the support networks that grow out of putting such a diverse and enthusiastic bunch of people together over a 10 week period. 

Past Step Up trainees often tell us that the scheme launched new opportunities for them, mostly because of the other people they met along the way. Rob Carroll, a student from Salford whose TV report was broadcast on North West Tonight, says: "The experience I've picked up on this course will stay with me forever, I can do anything with it."

In 2011 we are running Step Up in London, Glasgow, Newcastle and Media City in Manchester.

Glynn Ryland is the Manager of BBC Connect & Create

You can find out more about Connect & Create on the BBC Outreach website.

At some point in life everyone considers the idea of volunteering, giving their time and efforts to help others, and BBC staff are no exception.  In fact I'd say that there is a strong altruistic culture amongst staff here and a requirement for the corporation to channel this energy into measurable projects.

We often hear from charities who say they are up to their eyeballs in people wanting to come and 'paint a wall' for them.  We find that many charities are after something more meaningful, something that will resonate and leave a legacy for their beneficiaries.  So the BBC has a small department called "Connect & Create" and we are, to all intents and purposes, the volunteering scheme of the corporation.  It's a simple structure.  We have formal partnerships with ten national charities and a smaller number of local project charity partners.  We put together projects that place BBC staff into these charities in whole variety of ways.

Often we help the charities produce creative work, such as films or podcasts.  Other times we place staff with specific expertise to lead workshops and run seminars.  On other occasions they are involved in mentoring beneficiaries from all walks of life.  Each project is unique and there is always lots going on, as we run projects all across the year and across the UK.

Of course you can measure the numbers of staff and projects, but the real measure comes in the stories we hear from people.  We hear some amazing stories and staff seem universally bowled over by the experiences they have sharing their skills in this way.  My personal favourite is the team in Newcastle who mentored a group of disabled children in how to make a film about wheelchair access for their sports classes.  The children did such a great job with their film that it was broadcast on Look North that same evening. 

Glynn Ryland is the Manager of BBC Connect & Create

You can find out more about Connect & Create and see a list of its charity partners on the BBC Outreach website.