What is the role?
Our charity supports unpaid carers and caregivers across Gateshead. This includes children from the age of 5 and young adult carers from 16 up to the age of 25. The young people we work with may have complicated and stressful lives. Our session aims to deliver activities which are fun, educational, build confidence and improve their mental health and wellbeing. We would like you to help us do this. This could be helping us deliver a craft session, cooking class or an outdoor activity. If you can help us to create a warm and welcoming environment for young carers who have had difficult lived experiences, then this is the role for you. We’re looking for supportive and fun volunteers who can help a range of young people, including those who have challenging behaviour.
What’s involved?
You need to be willing to travel because many of our activities are one off sessions in different locations across the area. We will reimburse your travel costs, but you will need to be able to make your way to different locations. We run a shorter evening session during the week and all-day sessions (up to 8 hours) on a weekend. We also deliver over the school holidays. Some of our young people have challenging behaviour and creating a welcoming and familiar environment with faces they know really helps. We hope you can commit to regular weekly sessions, hopefully on a long-term basis.
We do plan our sessions well in advance which means you’ll know exactly what you’re signing up for. It also means we can give you the opportunity to get involved and help plan and organise what we deliver.
Here’s some of the tasks you may find yourself supporting:
- Setting up the space, cleaning and moving furniture
- Registration of young people joining the sessions
- Having friendly chats with regulars and new faces
- Organising new activity sessions with the volunteer coordinator
- Providing feedback on sessions
- Encouraging people to take part in the sessions
- Attending sessions both inside and outside (e.g. arts and crafts workshops, or a walk through Saltwell Park)
How we will support you
You will be supporting members of our team to deliver activities so you’ll always have someone at each activity who would direct you in what to do at each session.
Our Volunteer Co-ordinator will have regular monthly contact with you with providing support and guidance throughout your volunteering adventure.
We will support you to access training courses that would support you in your volunteering role.
Skills needed
There are a number of skills and qualities that are desirable to have to carry out this role:
- Friendly, fun and outgoing
- Reliable
- Empathetic and understanding of the needs of young carers
- Flexible and a willingness to ‘get stuck in’
- Confident in using your initiative
- Great communication and listening skills
- Active and able to keep up
- Resilient
Do you have an area of expertise that you think might be useful? We would be happy to discuss how we can use your skills or interests to support our work
Benefits for the Volunteer
- Supporting the wellbeing of young people and children in need.
- Enriching social interactions
- Learning over a range of different fun and engaging workshops, e.g. arts and crafts
- Experience and professional development for anybody interested in working with young and vulnerable people