It’s Volunteers’ Week from 1-7 June. The theme this year is ‘A time to say thanks’.

Where do we start? We have so much to be thankful for because we have a team of generous, talented and compassionate volunteers.

We are thankful for all the work our volunteers contributed pre-COVID and throughout the pandemic. This includes but is not limited to:

  • Packing 1,000s and 1,000s of envelopes with copies of Carers News
  • Befriending phone calls and meet-ups  with carers
  • Making welfare calls to carers of people with dementia
  • Phoning carers to complete an evaluation questionnaire  of our services
  • Making calls to carers who were unable to attend a carers group
  • Assisting with carer support groups
  • Running the Creative Carers group
  • Running the Carers Book Group
  • Writing articles for our volunteer newsletter
  • Proofreading our volunteer newsletter
  • Piloting our Safeguarding training for volunteers
  • Keeping our information database up to date
  • Meeting and greeting visitors at Reception
  • Running our weekly Bat & Chat sessions
  • Helping us with a varied range of admin tasks
  • Keeping our CEO, Val on her toes! 😊

Volunteers Week 2021

Sadly, the impact of COVID means that we have to say goodbye to our envelope packing team of volunteers this month. We will miss each of them, the buzz of activity, laughter and joy of envelope filling days. We know they will miss seeing us and each other. Their dedication has been essential to us, helping us to reach more than 12,000  carers. (However, our hardcopy newsletter will still be going out by a different way.)

Like our staff team, some volunteers have adapted to working from home. Volunteers have helped us to develop new ways of volunteering remotely and virtually. We are thankful for their willingness to be trailblazers!

As we move forward, we will create new volunteer roles to help us with our mission to support unpaid carers in Leeds. Watch this space.

In Volunteers’ Week, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our volunteers for their continued support throughout the past year.

Valerie Banks
Volunteer Coordinator

Carers Leeds supports unpaid carers:

Carers Advice Line: 0113 380 4300
Carers Advice Email: advice@carersleeds.org.uk