Womankind Bristol Women's Therapy Centre
Details of Role:
Be a part of an amazing group of women supporting women.
Our helpline offers emotional and listening support to women struggling with their mental health and past experiences. Helpline volunteers offer empathy and nonjudgmental warmth to the women who contact us over the phone and webchat.
Womankind is an established charity helping hundreds of women every year to improve their mental health and wellbeing. Our wonderful volunteers are the backbone of our organisation. We need you!
Whether you are looking for work experience, community, to learn, develop new skills or fulfil a passion to help other women, volunteer with us!
Training:
Our training comes with over 30 years’ experience of working with women’s mental health and will fully equip you to work on our helpline.
Over 10 weekly sessions, our training covers a range of topics from women’s mental health to sexual violence and domestic abuse.
Our training will either take place online or at our office in Brunswick Square, BS2, and includes home reading material in between sessions.
The Role:
Once you have successfully completed the training, you will be offered a place on our helpline. Each volunteer works the same shift every week, with the same volunteers – so you can make friends and support each other on shift!
You can come into our offices to do your shift or work remotely if you have a confidential and quiet space at home.
Your role will be to offer empathic, non-judgemental listening support to the women who contact us on the phone or through our webchat, with calls or chats lasting up to 50 minutes. You will also take more administrative calls, where you will talk about our counselling services and calls where you need to signpost to other services. Our training will fully equip you for this as well.
A three-hour shift includes:
- 30 minutes to check in with your supervisor at the beginning
- 2 hours taking calls or chats on the helpline
- 30-45 minutes to debrief with the other volunteers and your supervisor at the end of your shift
You will also be expected to attend group supervision with all the other volunteers, which runs from 6-7.30pm on the first Monday/Tuesday of every month.
There will always be a supervisor available during your shifts to support you and we often run extra training to support the work you do on the helpline.
You:
We are looking for volunteers who are enthusiastic and interested in supporting other women to improve their mental health and wellbeing. You will be honest, friendly and reliable with good communication skills, as well as a non-judgmental and patient listener.
The helpline role can be challenging and emotionally demanding at times. Therefore, we need women who have adequate life experience and feel emotionally resilient enough to take on the role. We welcome volunteers with personal experience of mental health and other relevant issues but will require you to have at least a one-year period of stability before starting the training.
As most of our helpline opening hours are during the daytime, we particularly welcome applications from women able to volunteer for morning and afternoon shifts. Availability is limited for women who can only volunteer during the evenings.
How to Apply:
Please follow the link below to our website where you will find our general volunteering application form:
https://www.womankindbristol.org.uk/apply-to-become-a-womankind-volunteer/
What Past Helpline Volunteers Say:
‘Womankind is doing amazing and essential work for women, and I am incredibly proud to have the opportunity to be involved’.
‘Having completed the helpline training, I have never been in a learning environment in which I felt so supported and received so non-judgementally. It felt like a huge privilege to get to hear such expertise and insights’.
*** Please note, we are currently advertising for befriending volunteers. Please see separate advertisements for these roles. ***