Something for Everyone: Volunteers' Week 2024
We would like to take this opportunity during Volunteers' Week to say a huge THANK YOU! to everyone who has given their time to help us in making a difference for BCHC patients, service users and the staff who treat them.
Volunteering with a charity is a great way to give back to your local community whilst learning new skills and gaining valuable experience of the way charities work to make a difference. There’s something for everyone in volunteering; take a look at some of the ways volunteers have supported us in enhancing patient experience:
Green Space Volunteering
Our garden areas provide patients and their loved ones with peaceful places to decompress after difficult consultations, process diagnoses or make beautiful memories with their families, as well as providing staff with a calming area to relax during breaks. We’ve had over 90 volunteers performing basic gardening activities such as weeding, planting, and raking at inpatient sites across the city, as well as litter-picking on the grounds of our community hospitals. Their hard work has made a huge difference in improving those outdoor spaces; over 2,000 bulbs and 53 saplings have been planted to help enhance these spaces for all who visit.Events Volunteering
As part of our work in the local community, BCHC Charity holds family fun days at the MAC Birmingham once or twice a year. These can be on a particular theme, such as our All Age Autism event specifically designed to help support families with accessing local autism support services as well as offering autism-friendly crafts, music, and movement activities, or more generally about keeping fit and healthy in Birmingham. Our volunteers are a huge support at these events, helping us to register attendees, fill out consent forms for photography, guide attendees to different activities, and generally help us in running the events as smoothly as possible.
Festive Volunteering
Each year, BCHC Charity provides gifts for adult inpatients spending the Christmas period under our care, and thanks to our ‘National Elf Service’ (aka volunteers from DWF, Groundwork UK and SopraSteria), 520 gifts were wrapped and delivered across the city in December 2023! The volunteers also packed up 25 gift bags for the Early Intervention Community Team to give to their most vulnerable patients, containing festive gifts such as biscuits and card games, as well as winter support items such as a fleecy blanket, slippers, and bed socks. Volunteers also helped us in putting on small winter fairs across the Trust, allowing us to raise much needed funds to cover winter expenses by selling donated craft items, raffle tickets, and more.Ad Hoc Volunteering
Due to the fact that Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust covers so many different clinical services, BCHC Charity have a wide range of projects we do to help Team BCHC deliver top quality care. This means that volunteering for us could range from packing our Winter Support Bags for vulnerable patients to creating birthday cards for the ward Birthday Boxes for patients celebrating their birthdays whilst under our care, or framing photographs and artworks for BCHC Charity’s art walls to creating bunting and decorations for events, our volunteers help us to spread a little sparkle across the Trust.
Unfortunately, we are currently unable to take on individuals for volunteering as we are only able to work with groups; please visit our Volunteering For Us page for more information.