Volunteering

Volunteers carry out every part of VOICE's work, from delivering messages and writing alerts to holding the in-person sessions and keeping these pages and the technology up to date.

Volunteering is open to anyone willing to learn the work, including people who use VOICE. Some of the work involves private messages and alerts that people trust, so each volunteer takes on the part that suits their experience. Only the volunteers doing that part of the work see people's messages and personal information. Reading and delivering messages and sending alerts are entrusted to volunteers who already do outreach work or who have earned the team's trust over time. Outreach workers and other staff of any organization volunteer as individuals, whether or not their organization is a partner.

The Work

Volunteers share the work in small groups, each responsible for one part of it, such as reading and delivering messages, translation and interpretation, outreach, research, and keeping these pages, Beacon, and the technology in working order. A volunteer can take part in more than one. At in-person sessions, volunteers also help people with calls, accounts, and Lifeline applications.

An outreach worker who volunteers signs in to the Switchboard with their own account and takes responsibility for messages to or from people they already know, so that someone known to several organizations can be reached through whichever of them knows the person best.

Expectations

None of the work requires a technical background. It calls for reliability, care with other people's information, a willingness to follow written procedures, and the judgment to recognize when a situation is beyond your capacity and to ask for help.

Before you begin, you sign a confidentiality agreement and complete an orientation that covers the procedures for your work and how to ask for help. No volunteer is expected to face a situation beyond their capacity alone. When something goes wrong, the team looks at what happened and how to keep it from happening again.

Volunteers sign in to VOICE's software with a password and an authenticator app on a phone. When a volunteer does not have reliable access to a phone, the team works with them to find one, as far as its resources allow.

Getting Started

Write to info@voicestl.org with a short description of yourself and the work you would like to do, or speak with a volunteer during an in-person session. A volunteer replies to arrange your orientation.