As well as taking part in activities, another option that is available to Coastline Homeless Service residents is the Volunteer Partner Programme.
This has all of the same benefits as the activities, but can also help clients to feel useful by putting any skills, experience or qualifications to use or by helping to gain any of those things.
For a long time Graham was in no position to be offering to volunteer as he was struggling to do anything at all. He had seen other people benefit from taking part, but didn’t think he could offer to help until a random conversation with my key worker.
He found myself saying, "I can do that…" as the key worker talked about some things that she wanted to put in place as part of her role in the organisation. The skills Graham had picked up over the years just so happened to be what she needed at the time. With a background in IT and video editing, as well as training as an audio engineer, Graham had all the necessary skills and even the equipment needed to help produce training videos.
Coastline's Volunteer Partner Programme was able to create a new volunteer post specifically to fit the role, and within a couple of months of having the discussion Graham was filming. He says he felt useful again with all of the positive feedback and being involved in a professional environment where his skillset and opinions were valued and my opinions respected.
Graham says: "Coastline seem to have gotten the balance right as far as being encouraging while not being demanding or inflexible which I am grateful for. In short, the Volunteer Partner Programme has been a completely unexpected positive that has gone quite some way towards giving me back some sense of the self-respect and usefulness that I’d gone without for so long."
There's more information about Coastline's Partner Programme on the volunteering page.