Become a Someone Like Me Volunteer
Love listening? Are you a kinship carer with great listening skills, who has a couple of hours a week to talk to other kinship carers?
What is Someone Like Me?
Someone Like Me service is a free peer support telephone service for kinship carers, delivered by kinship carers.
An opportunity for a kinship carer to talk to someone who knows what they’re going through. It’s not about offering information or advice but being there to support and listen.
Kinship carers are matched to trained volunteer kinship carers.
How does Someone Like Me work?
Once a kinship carer has filled in a form to say they’d like to talk to someone, our Digital Volunteering Manager will match them to one of our kinship carer volunteers. Matches might be based on age or gender preferences.
Volunteers will receive an email with details and convenient times to call the kinship carer back using a freephone number.
The service:
- Provides up to three phone calls with the same volunteer
- Calls usually last no longer than an hour and on average about 45 minutes
What skills and time commitment do you need to be a Someone Like Me volunteer?
If you are, or were, a kinship carer who can quickly help people to feel at ease and have great listening skills, this is a brilliant way to volunteer. We’ll make sure you have the training and all the support you need.
You’ll need to:
- Attend two training sessions (2 hours each)
- Be really good at logging your calls (so we know that kinship carers are supported)
- Be able to give at least one to two hours a week to make the calls
We’ll give you:
- Ongoing support and supervision
- Opportunities to talk to other volunteers and talk through any tricky conversations
- A free telephone service to use, so you won’t need to pay anything through your phone as you’ll use our number to make calls
Your experience:
You need to have experience as a current or former kinship carer, and we want you to be:
- Enthusiastic about supporting other kinship carers and willing to listen openly without judgement
- We ask that you complete all the required training and follow all policies and procedures
"I could hear the relief in her voice – I could almost see the tension dropping from her shoulders – was wonderful knowing, for the first time – that she knew she could be honest with someone about how being a kinship carer is so hard, and how it was making her feel. "
Other information:
We’d love to hear from kinship carers who are available to volunteer in the afternoons, between 12pm-2pm or 2pm-5pm.
That doesn’t mean you’re not welcome if you can offer different times – Someone Like Me runs Monday to Friday between 9am-9pm – and we match kinship carers and volunteers based on preferred times and similarity in situations.
Also – if you’re based anywhere in Wales – we’d love to hear from you as we want to continue to develop our work and services across all of Wales.
Please read our Someone Like Me volunteering role description.
How to apply and what happens next:
If this feels like a volunteering role which you’d be interested in, you can fill in the ‘expression of interest’ form below.
Our Digital Volunteering Manager will contact you for an informal chat within five working days. There’s no obligation to become a volunteer, you can ask questions and find out if it’s a role that works for your busy life.