Our people
Every minute of every day, Samaritans volunteers and staff are making a difference for people struggling to cope.
Following a surge of interest in volunteering during the pandemic, this year we welcomed and trained over 5,000 people to become new Samaritans volunteers. This is the highest yearly total for five years, and they have joined an extraordinary team, 22,000 strong.
Learning and development
We improved our volunteer and staff training and development programmes this year, including the launch of the Samaritans Training School. This is an initiative to recruit and develop volunteers into new service settings, such as city or specialist hubs. Staff and volunteers worked together to train 20 new volunteers through the school in 2021/22, and we’ll expand this approach.
We’ve also created new opportunities for learning this year, including improving our induction process and providing Samaritans-specific management training for staff managers. We introduced Learning Matters – a monthly programme covering various learning needs – and began doing more to support Branch Director development, with quarterly learning events and regular leadership workshops.
Remote volunteering
The coronavirus pandemic proved that, with the right training, support and equipment, many Samaritans volunteers could provide their skills from home or elsewhere. Our new specialist hubs are the first to be fully remote.
Shifts at our new Email Hub began on 8 November with 30 volunteers recruited to the roles. Each volunteer can choose whether to work in branch or from home. Shift volunteers and a leader are connected via a video link, which enables them to get to know and support their colleagues and to perform second checking. Alongside the Email Hub, we have also introduced a remote Quality Hub and Caller Support and Safeguarding Hub.
"At Bristol branch, we are carrying out a survey of volunteers to get an appreciation of their sense of belonging and what they feel about EDI. Our outreach strategy is proactively looking at local data to help us target our visibility and activity. We want to make sure that when people encounter Samaritans, they know we are here for them."
Susheel, Samaritans volunteer in Bristol
Susheel
Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI)
Samaritans should be a safe space for anyone who needs us, regardless of their background. To achieve this, we’ve been putting greater focus on reflecting and understanding the diverse communities we hope to serve.
For instance, we launched a Samaritans City Hub in Bradford, where one in four people describe themselves as of Asian or Asian British ethnic origin. We’ve been working with community groups in the city to increase the appeal and accessibility of volunteering, so that the Hub team reflects the local population.
To guide our charity-wide journey to attract volunteers and staff with a wider range of experiences, we have created new roles dedicated to this work, formed an EDI advisory group, and supported staff and volunteer networks.
We created EDI training modules for volunteers and staff and are embedding these principles across learning and development. All of our policies and processes are being reviewed to ensure they are as inclusive as possible, and EDI is at the heart of development of the new charity strategy.