Volunteer

Talking about business is fundamental to understanding it and getting a business going. PRIME needs volunteers to serve as one-to-one mentors for people just starting out, to help at events and to answer questions on the expert panel on the PRIME Business Club web site.

PRIME has also benefited from volunteers less-directly involved with clients but contributing specialist expertise. We have had help from journalists writing case studies and academics giving their time for free, for example.

Most recent appeals

• PRIME welcomes new Board members
• Become a PRIME online mentor
• Become a mentor for PRIME

If you are interested in helping please drop us a line at info@prime.org.uk.

It’s not always possible to take up all the offers we get, because a volunteer may need to be part of a larger team to accomplish much. For example mentoring requires a little training, some legal safeguards, insurance and materials – not to mention a flow of mentees. So it has to be done in a fairly formal way. In short this sort of volunteer needs to fit into quite a big project, but not all volunteering is like this.

As well as being one of the Prince’s charities, PRIME is linked to AgeUK – an organisation built on volunteering. And the altruistic impulse is thriving in less well-known ways in the modern era – both this and PRIME’s other web site are built on millions of lines of code written by the volunteers of the Open Source software movement (see Site Credits).

Volunteering’s hidden bonus to PRIME

Match funding (see Donate page) may sometimes apply to gifts of labour. Unpaid voluntary work is often recognised by large funders as the equivalent of an in-kind payment, and so can be used to match and thus free up more funds on a project they are already sponsoring.

So for example if you volunteer for PRIME on a project the EU or Lottery is funding, as well as the practical value of what you actually do we may get some cash from project funder that we wouldn’t otherwise receive.

For this to work we may need another form off you to confirm the hours you have put in. But it makes your time doubly valuable thanks to the way charity funding sometimes works.

If you're new here, you may also want to visit our main web site PRIME Business Club where we provide lots of practical information to support clients.