Giving to others can help improve your mental wellbeing by creating positive feelings and a sense of reward, giving you a feeling of purpose and self-worth and helping you connect with other people. Collectively the rewards of giving can strengthen community resilience.
Volunteers can help organisations to:
- Engage a diverse range of skills, experience, knowledge, opinions, ideas and approaches
- Reach more beneficiaries
- Raise awareness about the organisation’s cause, its profile and what it does
- Deliver efficient services
- Respond effectively to local needs
All available GDAS volunteering opportunities can be found here.
Volunteer Role Description:
The role of a GDAS Volunteer can be a varied and exciting opportunity and may include getting involved in all aspects of service delivery including Treatment; Well-being and Recovery; Clinical and Dispensing; Family Support; Outreach; Criminal Justice; Needle Exchange and Base Administration.
It is important to us to match the right volunteer with the right role. There are opportunities to volunteer in all strands of the GDAS service.
Wellbeing and Recovery:
- Facilitating or Co-facilitating Smart Recovery Groups; assisting the delivery of various Wellbeing groups e.g. Cookery group, Art group; Women’s group; Walking groups; Health and Fitness groups
- Provide support for Service Users to access diversionary activities
- Accompany staff and service users on diversionary activities
- Promote and co-ordinate new diversionary activities
- Support service users to appointments
- To assist in the setting up and marketing of community events and to assist at events when practicable
Outreach:
- Support outreach and engagement such as home visits, street outreach and community service partnership working.
Base Administration:
- Assist with base administrative duties: Send letters / post; assist with filing/archiving; minute meetings; room bookings
- Ensure that telephone calls from outside agencies, clients and internal staff are dealt with promptly and courteously, transferring calls to appropriate personnel when necessary
- Support reception and administration staff for visitors and service users
- Taking referrals from our SPOC (Single Point of Contact) phone line
Clinical:
Clinical services include substitute prescribing for opiate dependence, harm reduction initiatives including the provision of take home Naloxone; family planning and sexual health screening; Blood Borne Virus testing and referral on to specialist support. Volunteers can get involved in the Dispensary at our Newport base. Volunteers can be trained to complete DBST (Dry Blood Spot Testing) Blood Borne Virus Screening.
Needle Exchange:
For Volunteers interested in delivering Needle Exchange transactions and giving Harm Reduction advice, relevant training will be provided.
GDAS values our Volunteers. All GDAS volunteers and paid staff have equal access to training opportunities. It is very common for Volunteers to gain paid employment with us.
Professional Development includes:
- Mandatory Induction training
- Access to the Workforce Development Programme (WDP). All relevant training will be offered by the GDAS Learning and Practice Team
- Maintain and develop personal expertise and knowledge by reading, networking and further training in order to develop professional competence and to contribute to the development of competence within the GDAS team
- Regular supervisions will be provided by the Volunteer Link Worker and with your Volunteer Co-ordinator who will support and nurture the Volunteer in their role