Informal Volunteering

Informal Volunteering – Helping Hands from The Comm
A little about informal volunteering or the “Helping Hands from The Comm” project. The funding is from The Social Value Development Fund and is a pilot project. Ponthafren in Newtown submitted the application for the Project and have Informal Volunteering Officers based in 6 locations across Powys, one of which is based in Knighton Community Centre. The funding is for ad hoc volunteering opportunities to offer short-term (up to 6-weeks) help to someone who is currently unwell/incapacitated eg recovering from surgery/has a broken leg etc. It also means that anyone who is able to volunteer can dip in and out of volunteering, rather than being on a weekly or monthly rota, or can undertake one type of task or multiple types of tasks, on specific days of the week or certain months of the year. It offers flexibility to anyone who volunteers. The scheme currently doesn’t offer support within the home – volunteers wouldn’t be able to cross the threshold into a person’s home. Some examples of the type of support we are able to offer are:

• Shopping (via Knighton and District Community Support)
• Prescription collecting (via Knighton and District Community Support)
• Posting a letter
• Dog walking
• Delivering/collecting library books
• Covering a volunteer duty in an emergency
• Driving a client to an event at Knighton and District Community Centre ie Flix at The Comm, Women’s Hour, Thursday lunch drop-in.
• Short-term gardening help
• Putting out recycling/bins
• Putting up a key safe

It isn’t a scheme that is designed to take work away from ie local gardeners or other local trades in our community. We are looking to recruit more volunteers and also beneficiaries (people we are able to help). We have a target to recruit 70 volunteers by the end of January and we currently have just over 40 volunteers. Last quarter our volunteers helped 4 beneficiaries with 24.5 hours of volunteer time. We would like to extend the help we are able to offer, but need further volunteers with a variety of skills and experience and also beneficiaries who need short-term support.
If you are interested in volunteering, you can either come to our Volunteer Drop-in session held at Knighton Community Centre on a Tuesday morning, between 10am – 12 noon, or if you know someone who needs help or you want to find out more about volunteering, please contact Louise Home our Informal Volunteering Officer on 07848 021282.