Inspirational Volunteers at The Therapy Hub provide hope and support to others
Based at the Victoria Park Centre, Longsight, Manchester, this multi-disciplinary service provides assessment and time limited treatment for those in Later Life with complex mental health needs requiring intensive assessment or input and therapies.
In addition to paid staff, The Therapy Hub utilises a dedicated volunteer workforce to enhance the support they are able to offer to the residents of Manchester.
Our volunteer workforce at The Therapy Hub currently stands at 10 volunteers undertaking the following roles:
Peer Mentor
Our peer mentor Matt has undertaken the peer mentoring course at the curve and helps to support our patients at the therapy hub.
His kindness, compassion and sense of humour is what everyone loves about matt. He brings a wealth of experience and knowledge and helps service users and staff within his role. He also runs an armchair exercise group.
Volunteer Gardeners
Our gardening group runs on a Friday and is made up of 5 volunteers. Our gardeners complete a range of tasks including planting, weeding, growing fruit and veg and general garden maintenance.
The group enjoy working as a team and welcoming service users to the garden and encouraging participation in gardening - an activity that many of our service users enjoy or have enjoyed in the past.
Our garden group volunteers are all in their 70’s and enjoy keeping active and giving back to a service they have all attended.
Volunteer Artist
Our volunteer, Avril, runs a weekly art class for all our service users, she is extremely creative and so loving towards service users and staff and runs the programme from her own ideas and experience.
Avril brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the therapy hub and her input is invaluable. She spends quality time with service users and really encourages others to help express themselves and be creative. The art work produced is amazing and we are hoping for an exhibition space at the curve!
Reading Group Volunteers/ Experts By Experience
Andrew, Leroy and Terry all enjoy preparing and hosting our reading and poetry groups. They choose pieces from novels, biographies and poems to read and talk about with our service users.
Their poetry group members had written their own poems that were read out at the Annual Governor’s Meeting last year. They are all members of our experts by experience group that help with service development, creating meaningful leaflet and posters, input to later life policies and also making our services better.
Vanessa Shaw, Team Manager at The Therapy Hub, shares the impact that volunteers can have on service user care
Volunteers within our service are truly inspiring and they provide hope and support to others. Most of our volunteers have had experience of using services withing GMMH and are now volunteering to help others.
The groups our volunteers do are fantastic, they put so much time and effort into the preparation and group itself. Our service users love coming in and accessing theses groups as they are meaningful and inspiring. Our volunteers have helped shape the service user experience and they are always trying to improve wellbeing and therapeutic activity.
Having these types of roles within later life services helps people to engage and find enjoyment at very difficult times in their lives. Our volunteers inspire hope and can be that little glimmer of light at someone’s darkest time.
Our volunteers have gone from strength to strength and will continue to put the service and all our service uses at the forefront of what they do.
They inspire me everyday and I am extremely grateful for everything they do for me and the service users within our service.
Find out more about The Therapy Hub here.
