Frequently asked questions

Volunteering with Care for the Family can be a hugely rewarding experience. Whatever your role you will be making a real difference to families. Volunteering can also be a great way to make new friends, use your skills, or even learn new ones!

Care for the Family has been working in the UK for 25 years, running events and seminars, family building holidays, community based training, and producing high quality resources. You can be sure that you are backed up by a dedicated team who are committed to supporting you in your work.

We always do our best to look after our volunteers and make sure you have the support you need to thrive in your role.

As you begin your volunteering with us we will provide full training relevant for your role, and will put you in touch with a supervisor who will be on hand to help if you need.

We also provide regular newsletters to keep you up-to-date with all the latest news, and hold conferences and regional network days, which provide inspiration, a chance to meet up with other volunteers, and an opportunity to refresh your training.

We are looking for volunteers who share our passion for supporting family life and who are self-motivated to get the word out about Care for the Family in their local communities.

We also look for specific skills depending on the role you are interested in. Our facilitators, for example, have to be comfortable presenting material to a group, whilst our befrienders need to be empathetic and possess listening skills. But remember we don’t expect you to be the finished article straight away, and full training is provided. For more specific detail please ask to see a role description.

How we do things is a very important part of the Care for the Family ‘DNA’, and we look for volunteers who are passionate about sharing and reflecting our values in the way they work.

Finally, we are looking for those who have some time available to be able to dedicate to their roles. We don’t want to take over your life(!), but if you don’t have any spare time in your schedule you may need to think about how you are going to fit volunteering in!

Care for the Family is a Christian charity. Not everyone on our staff team or among our volunteers is a Christian. We do not proselytise, and we ensure that our courses and resources are accessible to those of all faiths, and none.

For certain voluntary roles, particularly where volunteers are going to be representing us, we are looking specifically for Christians who are able to represent the ethos of Care for the Family. Typically for these roles we would take up a reference from the applicant’s church leader.

We ask all our volunteers to undergo a standard application process prior to being trained.

Our aim is that if you are accepted as a volunteer, it will take no more than 3 months from your application until you are ready for training to ‘get out there’ in your community.

Of course this is subject to training dates, and your own availability, but we will do our best to keep in touch with you at all stages so you always know how your application is progressing.

You should expect the process of joining the team to look something like this:

For volunteer facilitators our training takes place at various locations across the country. We will cover the cost of your travel and any accommodation required for you to attend.

For some roles, such as bereavement befrienders, you will be asked to attend one of our bereavement support events, which are held in various locations across the UK.

All of our volunteers are trained free of charge. This is part of why we take the application process so seriously.

Obviously there is a cost to Care for the Family for providing training, and if you would like to make a contribution towards this we would be very grateful, though this is in no way obligatory.

This varies from role to role.

We ask our volunteer facilitators to try to organise and deliver at least two courses per year, both to make the most of their training, and keep their skills in practice.

For befrienders, the last thing we want to do is overburden you, so we’ll never assign you a new ‘befriendee’ without being sure that you are happy and that the time commitment is manageable.

We do not offer any form of payment for work done on a voluntary basis. However, we really value that time and energy that volunteers give and do not want anyone to be out of pocket as a result of their volunteering, or to put any form of financial barrier in the way of you getting involved.

We reimburse out of pocket expenses in line with our expenses policy, for example for travel or accommodation. Remember also that we do not charge for training for volunteers.