Volunteers’ Big Impact
posted: 05/08/2008
Volunteers led the first response to the HIV epidemic. Laura Hamilton, Volunteer and Development Manager, looks at how volunteers support is still changing living with HIV
We describe volunteers as the life-blood of George House Trust. We were founded by a group of volunteers, who were responding to the need for accurate information and support during the early days of alarm about AIDS.
Today over 100 volunteers, from a range of communities, still support and lead the organisation's work. Recently, the Commission for the Future of Volunteering argued that volunteering should be part of UK society.
For HIV sector organisations and our communities, volunteering and activism have always been right at the heart of what we do for over 20 years. Volunteers with George House Trust make a real difference in many ways. Volunteers help people to live healthy and full lives with HIV, recover independence after illness and to access a range of services.
Some bring personal experience of living with HIV. Some campaign against the deportation of HIV positive people, fight stigma and discrimination, raise vital funds and govern the work of the organisation, as trustees.
Many find that volunteering helps personal growth and development; whether through building self-confidence, expanding knowledge and skills, making friends, or taking the first steps towards returning to work.
Volunteering can also be a positive way to channel anger at the stigma, discrimination and injustice which still entangle many people's experiences of living with HIV.
Today, our volunteers still reflect the communities most affected by HIV. In recent years, we have seen more women and people from African communities joining our team in addition to continuing support from the gay community. Over a third of our volunteers are people living with HIV.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, before the advent of effective treatments for HIV, much volunteering centred around befriending and end-of-life support. Many people will recall buddying, which describes the social and emotional support provided for people who were ill or dying. For HIV positive people who could be very isolated, or experiencing stigma and prejudice from those around them, buddying volunteers offered respect, social contact, and a very special human kind of support.
In 2008, the needs of people living with HIV are dramatically different to a decade ago. Vastly improved treatments and drugs mean better health and near-normal life expectancy for most people now diagnosed in the UK.
Rebuilding independence
Volunteer support has shifted to helping people rebuild independence and take a greater part in mainstream activities and services. Volunteer support is less about filling a gap in someone's life and more about working with the person to help bridge that gap, and about developing the person's own varied interests, aspirations and abilities.
Today, volunteer support is as diverse as our service users. It ranges from supporting someone to go swimming or to take part in a yoga class, confidence boosting and building, to encouraging first steps towards returning to work or education, to explaining to recent migrants how to use public services such as transport, to finding local groups and services. A key difference is that the support is shorter term and focused around finding activities or interests that can be self-sustained, once the volunteer support ends.
Our aim is to help people create and redesign their own support networks, skills, work and leisure activities.
What hasn't changed is the warmth, humour and humanity that volunteers bring , and our conviction that volunteers play an essential role in ensuring quality
services and support for people living with HIV.
Interested in volunteering? Details at www.ght.org.uk
footnote www.volcomm.org.uk
The full issue of Insight 45 is attached for downloading
Related Downloads:
Insight45web.pdf
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