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Twelve volunteers indoctrinated; will never see families again

By Jim Griffin
March 19, 2010 at 1:50 pm

Last weekend saw our first recruitment day for health and social care volunteers. Until now we’ve taken on people as and when they come to us and in relatively small numbers, but with our services expanding our volunteer base must expand too so we’ve started to herd potential volunteers into group sessions.

Twelve plucky newbies made their way to our offices on Saturday ready to give their time to the world’s largest humanitarian organisation. We were recruiting for three things: medical loan maintenance volunteers to repair our stock of wheelchairs and ensure every one goes out in tip top condition; transport service volunteers to help people who are unable to use public transport and ineligible for non-emergency ambulance transfer, taking them to hospital appointments and respite care; and therapeutic care volunteers to provide gentle massage to people experiencing times of stress and crisis and allow us to reach out to new vulnerable groups.

The day began with the Red Cross Welcome Workshop to inspire the troops with talk of our fundamental principles, our work around the world and the many ways to pronounce our founder’s name. Most went for ‘Henry Dunnant’. Suitably inspired we battered through the recruitment paperwork in the afternoon and, subsequently uninspired, signed them up for the training they need, took their photos and sent them on their way and wallop – 12 new volunteers! Reference requests and disclosures are flying around the postal system as we speak and our plucky newbies will soon be out in the world helping people, changing lives and doing all kinds of good I can take credit for here.

And talk of reaching new and vulnerable groups with therapeutic care may have caught your eye back there. We’re hoping to do to therapeutic care what we’ve done to skin camouflage, and with new volunteers that work can begin in earnest. More on that later.

Much later. I’ll probably write again in June. By which I mean August.

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Tags: medical loan, Skin Camouflage, Therapeutic Care, transport service, volunteer

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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