The rewards of being a Samaritan are many; last year around 22,000 people volunteered as a Samaritan. We are looking for Volunteers to be there for those in need of emotional support.
We want to make it easy for our volunteers to join Samaritans. Volunteering your time and energy is an investment from you as well as from us. We will provide our volunteers with excellent training, mentoring and ongoing support to ensure you are confident in your new role. There are lots of opportunities to learn, gain new skills and develop your Samaritans role. We will be here to support through every step of your Samaritans journey with us.
We recognise and value the unique and individual skills of our volunteers of all ages and at different stages of life. You can choose from a wide variety of volunteer roles that best fits in with your lifestyle and the time you have available. Deciding to sign up as a volunteer will still mean fulfilling a number of hours duties, but you can choose how many duties you do and when you want to do them. Our duty roster is online so booking a shift remotely around your diary is easy!
There are different ways you can volunteer!
- Become a Listening Volunteer – Our listening volunteers support those who are in despair by answering calls. Being a Listening Samaritan also means being there to listen to those who need us and being there at night is an important part of delivering an effective service.
- Night Time Listeners – Night time is when many of our callers need us the most. We ask all volunteers to do a night duty around once a month unless there is a particular reason for not doing so. Night duties last for 3 or 4 hours and we class a night duty as starting after 10.00 pm. If you are a night owl, we even have a special package for volunteers who want to volunteer exclusively at night.
- Support volunteers – Our Support volunteers play a key role in enabling the operation to function. There are lots of technical, operational, marketing and fundraising roles you could try - it all depends on what you want to do, what you are good at and how much time you want to give.
We are currently looking for help with fundraising, training, administration, recruitment, marketing, social media, operations, and other specific short-term projects.
We hope you will join us and look forward to welcoming you as a Samaritans Volunteer!
To find out more about any of the above, simply email [email protected]