East Shropshire Talking Newspaper For The Blind (ESTN) is based in Telford and provides a FREE weekly USB memory stick of local news and features including items from the local press and other publications, such as Shropshire Magazine and Info sound, alongside items produced in-house by the ESTN team; covering a wide range of subjects and matters of interest.

We are staffed entirely by volunteers, and operate solely via voluntary donations from both individuals and organisations, for example Local Councils and Social organisations. We receive no government or private funding as a matter of course.

We are looking for Volunteer Editor/Reader

Role:

To select and prepare the 45 minutes of material to be included in the News section of the week’s issue, drawn from the on-line version of the local Newspapers.

To self-record their narration of these News Items and upload the audio files to the ESTN Filestore (hosted on Google Drive). 

A team of people act as joint Editor/Readers (each taking their turn on a roster).

Thursday – Sunday (HOME WORKING as necessary to complete the duties).

Total 4 Hours Work approx. Once every 4 Weeks approx.

Our tea party hosts are a vital part of the Re-engage team. Tea parties provide a lifeline of friendship for our older people, and the regular, warm, friendly chats and companionship provide a vital link with the outside world from which they have become isolated. 

Re-engage needs enthusiastic volunteers to work as tea party hosts.

This is a flexible, voluntary role that can easily be fitted in around your own lifestyle and availability. As a volunteer host you will run a local Re-engage tea party one to two times a year.

You will host a group made up of volunteer drivers, the group coordinator and older guests in either your home or a community venue. The tea parties will last around two hours and will usually take place on a Sunday afternoon.

Telford & Wrekin Council is advertising for more volunteers to join the Independent Appeal Panel dealing with primary and secondary school admissions and exclusion reviews. It is a requirement that the Local Authority’s School Admission Authority provides arrangements for appeals against decisions not to allow a child to attend a school or regarding a decision to exclude a child from a school within Telford and Wrekin.

The role

Admission panels comprise of three members to hear and determine appeals by parents who are not happy with the decision made about their child’s school placement. The panel is independent of the education authority and draws on a pool of lay and independent members to sit on particular appeals. This is an essential role that provides impartiality of decisions for parents and children in Telford and Wrekin.

Membership of the panel comprises of:

- People who have experience in education, who are acquainted with educational conditions in the local authority area, or who are parents of registered pupils in school. This can include current or previous head teachers, teachers, governors or parents

- Lay people, someone without personal experience in the management of any school or provision of education in any school except as a school governor or in another voluntary capacity.

We are a Christian charity that collects unwanted usable tools, refurbishes them, sorts them into trade tool kits and sends them to the developing world for livelihood creation.

Community Champion volunteers: 

The main role of a Community Champion is to help raise support in their community for TWAM. This will mean organizing events (or finding people to organise them) such as coffee mornings, quiz nights, open gardens and all sorts of creative ways to fundraise.

It means keeping an eye on what is going on in the community and perhaps finding people to enter sponsored events such as fun runs, 10Ks, walks for TWAM.

It means keeping an eye on what is going on in the community and perhaps finding people to enter sponsored events such as fun runs, 10Ks, walks for TWAM.

It will include working with our other volunteers to arrange events such as TWAM evenings with coffee and cake or a buffet.

Community Fundraisers need to be people with big ideas and the energetic enthusiasm to see them through.

What will you be doing?

You will work within your local community, Church, or community group to promote TWAM and help raise the funds we need to keep the tools flowing.

You will organise events of all kinds or find others to do them for you, from music nights to traditional coffee mornings.

You’ll get pull-up banners, leaflets, resources and loads of support from everyone at TWAM from the Volunteering Coordinator and the Fundraising and Communications Officer to your local TWAM Tool Ambassadors and Community Ambassadors.

What are we looking for?

Passionate, energetic people who can organise things and get things done, and people who can identify others and mobilise them to organise events.

We really need people who can work as a team and really get stuck into the very exciting role.

What difference will you make?

We always need people to collect tools and refurbish them, but without the funds to run our vans and keep our Refurbishment Centres operating, nothing would happen. Shipping to Africa costs a lot of money and again, we need the funds to do it.

This is why the Community Champion is so important, and this is the difference you will make, because nothing happens without the people willing to ask for the funds to run the charity.