Emotional Support Volunteer

About this role

Quetzal works to provide free, and inclusive, counselling, support services and outreach to empower women and girls who have experienced childhood sexual abuse to begin recovery from trauma. We are available to all women over the age of 16 in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland and provide the longer-term support necessary to work with the multiple and complex trauma caused by childhood sexual abuse.

Demand for our services is ever increasing. Unfortunately demand outstrips our current capacity and we therefore operate a waiting list.

The purpose of this voluntary role is to support women who are on our waiting list by providing emotional and practical support in the form of ‘check-in’ calls, pre-therapy calls and occasionally assisting with peer groups.

Volunteers are asked to complete at least one shift a week within the core opening hours and make pre-arranged calls to women who are on our waiting list and have been identified as needing additional support or advice. This role will be based in our office on Talbot Lane in Leicester City Centre.

Each scheduled ‘check and chat’ call takes around 15 minutes and will involve offering emotional support over the phone, guiding clients through our self help guide, answering any questions and performing risk assessments as required.

Check-in is a powerful service for clients needing someone to talk to, it is not therapy, and you will not be expected to explore the abuse with the service users. The ability to put boundaries in place and respond sensitively to distress is absolutely essential to this role. It requires the use of focused listening skills to build rapport with clients and to promote their wellbeing.

Emotional support volunteers are required to:

• Understand, respect and uphold the ethos of Quetzal and its work with survivors.
• Abide by confidentiality and data protection.
• To follow all Quetzal policies and procedures in relation to providing an ethical and appropriate support service to survivors of sexual abuse.
• Contacting your allocated clients every week.
• Keep appropriate records of calls on our specialist database system.
• Report any safeguarding concerns to the designated safeguarding leads.

We support our volunteers by providing training in sexual abuse and emotional support skills. Volunteers have access to on-going training, supervision with a counselling supervisor each month and regular team meetings.

We ask that volunteers commit to work with us for a minimum of 12 months.

Role Commitments

Emotional Support volunteers are dealing with some very difficult issues to enable Quetzal to fully support you, volunteers must keep training and supervision up to date. Therefore, the commitment required is as follows:

Initial training day and ongoing training as necessary

2 hours per week as a regular shift, within core hours (10am-5pm).

One supervision per month. These are conducted in a group setting and last around 1 hour. Volunteers are required to attend supervision to promote their own well-being and skills.

Qualifications/Experience Required

There are no pre-requisites for this role in terms of professional qualifications, however some experience, education or training in counselling, psychotherapy, support skills, mentoring, psychology would be an advantage.

Training 

Emotional Support volunteers receive extensive training before they begin to support clients. The training will cover a range of issues and skills which will equip volunteers to deal with clients.

As standard Emotional Volunteers will receive

Safeguarding training

Childhood sexual abuse and its impacts

Working in a trauma informed way

Emotional support skills

When you can volunteer

Requirements

• Gender restrictions

Female only due to the nature of the services we provide.

Location

Location Talbot Lane, Leicester, UK