You have a superb opportunity to join our growing Befriending and Mentoring project for children and young people who have experience of being in care. This project works with over 80 children and young people across Tees Valley.
This project offers two different types of support to young people:
• An Independent Visitor (IV) is a volunteer for befriends, who wants to get to know young people and spends time with them. They are there to support, listen and advise and have fun with young people. These activities can range from going out to eat at a favourite restaurant; sporting activities such as football or basket ball; a trip to the cinema to see the latest films and lots of other things. Children and young people in care have a right to be considered for an Independent Visitor, if it’s in their best interests to have one. This is a statutory right enshrined in legislation.
• A mentor is a volunteer who supports young people to identify and work towards their goals. They still support, listen, advise and have fun with young people but have more of an agreed focus on supporting change. Goals will be identified by young people. We are particularly trying to work with young people who will shortly leave care or have left care.
We envisage that your time will be focused on the mentoring aspect of the project.
The key elements of your role will be:
• Talk to children and young people about the project, establish if they’d like a volunteer (and what sort – a mentor or befriender) and what a good match would look like in a volunteer
• Recruitment, selection and training of volunteers
• Be a constant source of support and guidance to volunteers
• Work with and regularly keep in touch with social workers, parents, residential homes, children and young people, volunteers and other stakeholders to ensure matches are going well, are safe, and visits taking place regularly.
• Organise and host events for children, young people and volunteers
• Implement the organisations participation framework, ensuring young people’s voices are heard and supporting them to co-deliver aspects of the project
• Identify opportunities to broaden the project to better meet young peoples needs
After three months employment we will consider requests for you to do some of your job working from home if you’d like to. The ability to travel around Tees Valley is essential as some visits must be done face to face; you should usually have a current driving license.
You will be joining a local Charity that works tirelessly to help improve the lives of children, young people, and families. We’ve 20yrs track record serving the local community an offer a broad range of projects, from befriending and mentoring, through emotional wellbeing, parental relationship support and through our sister company, fostering. We are a small agency that makes a big impact. If you’d like to help us change lives for the better, we’d love to hear from you.