National Volunteers' Week 2023: Celebrating our volunteers

Intro from our Volunteer Co-ordinator Chryssy:

It is my pleasure to be able to look back on the year and reflect on everything our amazing volunteers have achieved. Even though we have had a difficult year, there have been more hours volunteered than since before the first lockdown in March 2020. While we have our mainstays of befriending and the groups and events catered for by our community engagement team, the other contributions have shifted and adapted to our needs and circumstances.

We have had a more active social media volunteer team, and as our research team builds, more research hours. There has been a rejigging of our Ambassador Programme but we have still maintained a good level of commitment from our Ambassador Team and although we started late in the year we have benefitted from re-energising our cohort of admin volunteers, who will have a critical role in bringing our back office operation to the next level.

So the headline figures are:

Total number of hours volunteered April 2022 – March 2023 11,752

The value of the volunteering hours for Opening Doors is £140,436 This is an increase of 42.9% over the previous year.

Even though this represents an amazing contribution to the charity it doesn’t really capture the human impact of what our volunteers achieve. We have managed 40 face to face befriending relationships, 90 telefriending relationships, including our work with people in West Yorkshire in partnership with our Friends at Out Together, we have facilitated over 30 social groups every month, mostly face to face, but including some virtual meet-ups, we have held events with partners at Google, the Breakfast Club, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the LGBTQ+ History Month exhibition at Bishopsgate Institute. As well as participating in all the London Prides and Trans Pride in Brighton, our volunteers supported our Silver Pride Event in October, and our annual Christmas Event in Pimlico.

Our members have felt the benefit and the love from all of this support, as have we and we can’t thank you enough for everything you have done! Together we are stronger, safer and generally sunnier, and the volunteering glue that holds us all together helps all this happen!

Winners from our Volunteer Awards Evening:

Photographs taken by Sydney McCourt