Family Wellbeing Volunteer - Midlothian

Are you able to offer a few hours of your time each week?
If so, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

This volunteering opportunity will be based with the Midlothian Family Wellbeing team, in Dalkeith.

Our aim is to help children and families recover and move on from trauma and/or adversity that they have faced. Volunteering with the Midlothian team will complement the support families receive from the wider team to help build confidence and stronger family relationships, reduce isolation, build stability in their recovery and promote a sense of belonging with their wider community.

We are particularly interested in hearing from people with their own lived experience of addiction and recovery orientated supports, whether that is as the person in addiction or experience of a loved one’s addiction.  If you now have stability in relation to recovery and mental health and are interested in volunteering in this area, we would like to hear from you.  However, we also welcome applications from those applicants who do not have lived experience but have a passion for doing the right thing for children and families.

What will I be doing?

Our volunteers build relationships with families in different ways including:

• Family Wellbeing – this can include activities such as helping to establish and support family play and spending time with the family in the local community accessing activities and resources.
• Befriending – developing a 1 to 1 supportive, reliable, social relationship with a child, young person or adult by arranging weekly opportunities to experience new activities and develop interests. 
• Parent Mentoring - helping to increase a parent or carer’s confidence and self-esteem.
• Group Work – supporting the work of Children1st staff within group sessions with parents as well as whole family activities.

During training and induction we will explore further what families need and the skills and qualities you could bring to one of these roles.

What do I need to know?

We provide a comprehensive introductory training course that will equip you with the skills and knowledge that you need. 

Our next training will run on the following dates:

• Sun 5th Nov – 10.00am-4.30pm
• Weds 8th Nov – 6.00pm-8.30pm
• Weds 15th Nov - 6.00pm-8.30pm
• Sun 19th Nov - 10.00am-4.30pm

This training is being run in partnership with our East Lothian and Edinburgh services and will take place at the Children 1st office at 83 Whitehouse Loan, Edinburgh, EH9 1AT. We cover reasonable travel expenses for those attending the training.

We also provide all of our volunteers with ongoing support and are able to reimburse reasonable out of pocket expenses.

We ask volunteers to commit to giving a few hours a week for at least a year.

Please see role description below for further details. 

If you would like to apply for this role please download and complete the application form, criminal convictions self-declaration and equal opportunities monitoring form and email them to volunteer@children1st.org.uk.

We welcome and encourage applications from potential volunteers of all backgrounds, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, belief, disability, who reflect our values.