Volunteering Opportunities
Volunteer mediators in our Community Mediation team or Muslim Mediation Service
The CM team uses volunteers for case visits and mediations mostly when neighbours are in dispute but we are also branching out into conflicts in other areas too. The MMS is for any family or relationship issue and uses volunteer Muslim mediators. Volunteers firstly attend our training course called ‘Introduction to Conflict Management” (ICM) and need to attend the ongoing training sessions. We require a long term commitment of several years although you may only go on a few cases each year. We can talk with you about the personal qualities and skills needed to become a mediator if you are interested in finding out more.
Management Committee
Our management committee has the important task of making strategic decisions and plans for the organisation as a whole. All the people on the committee are volunteers and serve for a minimum of one year. If you think you have skills, qualities and experience that could be useful on the management committee we would be very pleased to hear from you. We are in particular need of people with financial experience. You will need to be able to commit to at least an evening meeting a month, usually Mondays.
Community conversations
We have been funded from April 06 to pilot a “Community Conversations” project in Newham. This will involve small groups (6-8 people) meeting together in a safe environment. We will be bringing people together from different community groups who wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to meet together. We will be allowing people to talk about contentious issues (e.g. the London bombings) with a view to sharing and dialogue rather than coming to an agreement. We need volunteers who can give the time to networking in the community to find willing participants and who would like to develop their facilitation skills (training will be provided). You will need to be one of our mediators to work on this project.
Links within the community
We are very keen to make links with all the different groups of people within Newham: faith groups, tenants/residents associations, community centres, parents groups, interest groups, ethnic community groups. You can help out by putting up flyers and being a link person in an organisation.
Administration, office support and DIY
Sometimes we organise peace-building events within the borough. We have organised peace vigils, a Fast for Peace, and helped to organise a refugee week festival and one world week events. These events take a lot of organisation and we can use volunteers to: develop ideas, write publicity….deliver publicity….telephone round to encourage people to attend…..photocopying…..organising refreshments, and lots more. There are a range of DIY tasks that we need help with from time to time.
Supporters/Befrienders
Sometimes we find that mediation does not fully resolve issues and that more ongoing support is needed for a while to support someone through a conflict and to help coach them in conflict resolution skills.
Peace building and conflict resolution
We like to support and develop our volunteer’s conflict resolution skills and ideas and are willing to spend time to support ideas and events that are feasible.
Trainer in conflict resolution
We occasionally offer training and coaching to volunteers to become trainers. There is an informal selection procedure for those who have some experience as our volunteer mediators. We are particularly keen to recruit volunteers from BME groups to help diversify our training team.
Interpreters and translators.
Usually our mediators can speak the appropriate languages but sometimes we do require an interpreter. We would love our basic leaflet to be translated. If you think you could help with this please contact us.