Volunteering
The benefits of volunteering!
Volunteering with us is a great way to spread conflict resolution skills and better understanding between communities in Newham. Volunteers receive quality training and ongoing support. Volunteers have the opportunity to work in all areas of the project but mostly volunteers make up our team of trained mediators working in the Community Mediation team or the Muslim Mediation Service. See our Community mediation page for more details. Volunteers are encouraged to visit us as often as they can and are always welcomed. We hold social events and send regular mailings and a volunteers' newsletter.
Training and support
Initially volunteer who wish to mediate attend our eight day Introduction to Conflict Management (ICM) course, which we run two or three times a year. At the end of the course each volunteer will be given a one-to-one feedback session to confirm that they have picked up the basic conflict resolution and mediation skills or to identify the areas they need to work on. Volunteers that we think are ready become "Trainee Mediators" and attend an Induction Day to find out about the practicalities of volunteering with us and to find out about our policies and proceedures. For more details about the course see our Training page.
We run ten training evenings each year to enable our volunteer mediators to share ideas with each other and to update their mediation skills. Volunteers are expected to attend the majority of these training sessions. Our staff also arrange to meet individually with each volunteer to provide support.
There are many other ways of volunteering but we like all our volunteers to attend at least the first four days of the ICM course. Appropriate training and support will be given depending on the volunteering role.
Time commitment
We ask volunteer mediators to stay with us for three years if at all possible. It is unlikely that you will be allocated more than four cases a year although there are plenty of other opportunities to develop your conflict resolution skills. When allocating cases we try to "match" mediators with the clients and so the number of cases we allocate to you will depend on the referrals we receive, your availability and how quickly you return our phone calls.
Volunteers on the Management Committee (MC) are asked to make a committment for the whole year so that they can attend the monthly meetings (evenings) and offer other support when required.
Interested ?
Please download a copy of our Volunteering Opportunities leaflet