Lunch club volunteer role specific training
Training 1: an introduction to your role (4 minute read)
Thank you for giving your time as a lunch club volunteer with Re-engage. Your contribution is vital in ensuring that our older people can attend regular lunch clubs and we are grateful for your support.
How do lunch clubs work?
Once a week on a Wednesday, older people are either collected by the lunch club minibus or make their own way to the lunch club venue - The United Free Church, Crosby Rd N, Waterloo, Liverpool L22 0LQ - where they join the rest of the club for lunch and companionship. Re-engage only has one lunch club and it varies in size week to week depending on how many older people are able to attend but on average there are 26 guests.
Roles and responsibilities
Each lunch club will consist of a lunch club coordinator, lunch club volunteers, the minibus driver, and older people.
Your role as a lunch club volunteer is to support the lunch club coordinator to run a safe and fun lunch club where older people feel welcomed and listened to.
You’ll set up tables, welcome the older people to the lunch club, collect payment, serve food, wash up, and tidy the lunch club venue after each lunch club.
Good to know
Older people come from all backgrounds and walks of life and so do our volunteers. We are an inclusive organisation and will consider every older person application we receive, even if it doesn’t quite meet our criteria. As a general rule however, older people are:
- Aged 65 and over.
- Lonely, isolated or in need of companionship.
The arrangements
The majority of lunch club volunteers volunteer a few times each month, and some volunteer each week, but there is no expectation that you will do so.
The lunch club coordinator will be your main point of contact for everything to do with your voluntary role and you will be given their contact details when you start volunteering. You’ll arrange with the lunch club coordinator when you are able to volunteer, and they will add you to the lunch club rota.
Lunch club volunteers often take it in turns to bring deserts to the lunch club and the lunch club coordinator will ask if you are able to support with this and add you to the lunch club desert rota if you can but there is no obligation to do this.
For confidentiality reasons, you will not be given access to the contact details of any of the other volunteers in your group or the older people, so please make sure you don’t ask for their phone numbers or home addresses.
Your volunteer handbook has more information about volunteer boundaries and managing expectations.
Important
If during a chat an older person or another volunteer tells you something that concerns, you (for example something that makes you worry that they might be at risk of harm) please speak to the lunch club coordinator in private as soon as possible.
The lunch club coordinator will follow the Re-engage safeguarding adults at risk policy and report the concern to Re-engage. It’s important that you don’t promise to keep anything that an older person or another volunteer tells you a secret or to ‘fix’ any problems that the person may be facing.
Your role is to report your concerns as soon as possible to the lunch club coordinator.