Volunteering at Richmond Fellowship’s Life Links service in Leicester has been a really worthwhile and rewarding experience. As a volunteer you are trained to take calls on the free phone line service and are also given the opportunity to attend open access surgeries. These services offer information, advice and navigation to callers regarding any mental health issues they may be experiencing, as well any general problems they have.
Our role as volunteers is to try to direct callers to organisations in their local area that may be able to support them with the particular issue they are facing.. We also then help them with any referral forms that may be required by these organisations and also offer advice and support in filling out referral forms for the recovery service here at Life Links, where service users are allocated a recovery worker to help them progress.
Overall taking calls and meeting people face to face has been at times challenging, but all in all an extremely rewarding process, as very often the people you speak to are suffering from a variety of mental health problems so you feel like you are aiding their recovery process, which is a very worthwhile endeavour.
