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Survey for Volunteers with Lived Experience of Homelessness

Survey for Volunteers with Lived Experience of Homelessness

Survey for Volunteers with Lived Experience of Homelessness

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

The UK’s biggest ever peer mentor survey?

 

Volunteers with lived experience are now an integral part of most homelessness services, typically as peer mentors or recovery navigators. For many people, the chance to give back as a volunteer gives them a fresh purpose and can play a key part in their recovery journey. But how are service user volunteers treated? While many are very happy with the support and training they receive, others get little to no training and ongoing support, and often have little choice about what role they take as volunteers. Indeed, some are not even recompensed for the financial costs of their volunteering.

Russell Webster and Revolving Doors Agency are co-producing a best practice guide to help organisations to treat their service user volunteers well and with the support they need to succeed. The format and the content of this guide will be created by a group of people with lived experience of being service user volunteers with Russell. To ensure this guide is based on examples of best practice and directly addresses the concerns of current peer mentors, we are running what we hope will be the largest ever survey in the UK asking about people’s experiences as a service user volunteer.

 

If service users volunteer for your organisation, please ask them to invest 10-15 minutes of their time in taking the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/peer21

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