Being a sense shop volunteer is a great way meet people, boost confidence and gain valuable retail experience.

In this role, you will be providing a puppy with a vital foundation for its future role as a guide dog. This is a full-time volunteering opportunity as a puppy will live with you in your home for around 12-16 months.

What you’ll be doing

We rely on volunteers like you to help us improve the lives of people with sight loss. In this role your support will include:

- Following Guide Dogs Puppy Raising for Excellent Partnerships (PREP) programme, to raise and prepare a puppy to become a guide dog.

- Using our guidelines to care for your puppy e.g., providing sufficient exercise.

- Familiarising a puppy to a wide range of environments.

- Teaching a puppy to be alone by gradually building up from a few minutes to a maximum of 4 hours.

- Attending regular puppy classes.

- Meeting regularly with Guide Dogs representatives to discuss your pup’s development.

- Completing regular on-line questionnaires to help us monitor puppy progress.

You’ll get

Volunteering is a two-way street, so in return for your time you will get a dedicated volunteer manager/key contact who will help you settle in and support you during your time with us. You’ll also get:

- The satisfaction in knowing you are supporting people with sight loss to live actively, independently, and well.

- The challenge and reward of seeing a puppy develop in your home.

- The opportunity to learn and develop your understanding in dog body language, learning theory, the human animal bond and the life of a guide dog.

Training and support

This role has 13 hours of training and then you’ll be ready to go! These modules include:

- Our bespoke Puppy Raising for Excellent Partnerships (PREP) training to support you at every stage of the puppy’s development.

- Ongoing training both virtually and face to face as part of the role.

If you have questions about the training requirements, we can answer these at your interview along with any other support or accessibility needs you may have.

Volunteering for Guide Dogs should never leave you out of pocket. We’ll make sure we pay any expenses related to your volunteering with us in line with our policy.

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.

Local homelessness organisations Stay, Maninplace, Kip and YMCA are looking for flexible people who just want to help in general, wouldn't mind being an extra pairs of hands and willing to take on a variety of tasks.

This could involve being an extra pair of hands during group sessions and helping out with the associated tasks. This also could include making drinks, handing out materials, helping clients, setting up and clearing away the activities etc.