What does a Helpline Volunteer do?

Parents Helpline Volunteers deliver Parents Advice Centre's (PAC) unique Parents Helpline - offering a listening ear, support, and guidance to people facing any kind of family difficulty.

Across Northern Ireland, we deal with approximately 5,000 calls each year. These range from the day-to-day anxieties that every family faces, to more serious concerns for a child’s safety.

The role of the Parents Helpline Volunteer is to support and empower parents and to protect children. They do this by ...

providing person-centred support, information and guidance to people who contact Parents Helpline
accurately and fully completing all necessary records after each contact
being punctual and reliable in fulfilling at least one three hour shift per week
participating in monthly supervision group meetings and ongoing skills development workshops
continually monitoring their own practice, and obtaining guidance and support from their Supervisor, Peer Supervision Group or Regional Manager (as appropriate)
working in a respectful and supportive way with staff and volunteer colleagues
complying with all the policies and procedures of PAC, paying particular attention to child protection and confidentiality
contributing to raising awareness of Parents Helpline in the local area.

The Parents Helpline Volunteering Experience

Being a parent is one of the most enjoyable but difficult and challenging roles that you will ever have in life. It is one of the only things you will ever be required to do without the help of some kind of training manual or a step-by-step guide on how to be a success. I think most of us feel that, a lot of the time we should be doing better in this role, that we are not as good as the parent next door and that our children’s mistakes are a reflection of our own lack of skills and imperfections. I decided to apply to volunteer for Parents Helpline about four and a half years ago when my own three children were still of primary school age and a lot of these feelings were running around my head.

One of the first things I learned during the Parents Helpline preparation training was that I was not alone in my experiences. I was in a group with other parents - all of whom had struggled with their own inadequacies and personal issues in the parenting role and yet all wanted to help others. This on its own helped me enormously. The bottom line was that none of us were perfect parents (if indeed there is such a thing!) but that it didn’t really matter.

The training guided us to discover what skills we already had as parents - more plentiful than any of us had realised. At the end of the training we all felt we had gained something invaluable, we knew more about ourselves and had learned life skills which we were able to take back into our own situations as well as into the experience of being a volunteer for Parents Helpline.

For the next three years I had the extremely rewarding and challenging experience of being a volunteer with Parents Helpline – an organisation which offers you on-going skills development, excellent supervision and wonderful support and learning from your fellow volunteers. The work is full of variety and you are constantly learning and growing through your role of supporting parents over the telephone and through appointments.

Being a volunteer with Parents Helpline has been a life-changing experience for me. It brought together a lot of knowledge that I didn’t realise I had, taught me so much more and started me on a route I hadn’t expected to take. The benefits to my own family have been immense and the support and friendship, which I have received within the organisation, are irreplaceable.

All parents have a lot to give, have a lot of unrecognised and underdeveloped skills. All of us have times of difficulty and times of crisis. None of us are perfect. But we can all ask for help and realise the amazing sense of freedom in not feeling alone. We can all learn and grow and being able to help someone else through a difficult time in their life can be a wonderfully rewarding experience. Being a volunteer with Parents Helpline brings all these things together in a uniquely fulfilling way – I would recommend it to anyone.