Bristol Samaritans

Bob Morgan Director of Bristol Samaritans, has been involved in the Samaritans movement for over 20 years, and has spent eight of those years in the Bristol Branch. The Bristol branch of the Samaritans is a charity in it's own right. Now in his third year of his directorship, Bob tells us how the organisation is responding in different ways, by helping people deal with the despair, which can often lead to suicide.

Can you tell us about volunteering at the Samaritans?

The Mass majority of the Samaritan Movement is unpaid. Nobody in this branch is paid. Expenses are paid (travel costs, etc.) but no paid staff whatsoever. There used to be an image of volunteers of sort of 'twin set and pearls' but it has got much wider now. More denim and less tweed is what we are aiming for. We have got 150 volunteers in Bristol with age ranging from twenty to eighty year olds. The only common factor is that they care about other people and is prepared to listen.

What sort of training is needed for this role?

We have a national training programme, it is a modular scheme (12 modules), with initial modules taking up to six weeks to complete. Then after a couple of months you go onto the phones with a mentor, somebody who will be with you all the time, you listen and learn to take calls. Then when volunteers complete the remaining modules they are ready to volunteer. The ethos of the movement is that we cannot solve people's problems, we're not here to solve (specific).Volunteers are needed by people, who use the service to talk through their problems, with someone they do not know. We are a complementary service; we work in tandem with other services and specialist advice lines etc.

What sort of social problems do you deal with?

Typical problems are around relationships, bereavement, employment (though this has come done in recent years); mental health is also a significant factor. We deal with many problems, of people in despair, which may lead to suicidal feelings. But you do not have to be suicidal to call the Samaritans. We do not necessarily know all the problems and concerns of the people who contact us; we just encourage them to talk through their problems.

We are not a suicide prevention agency in the usual sense, we cannot physically stop people committing suicide, in same way the police or other emergency services can. We aim, through self-determination, to persuade people to change their minds about suicide.

In what ways has your service changed?

The Bristol branch had 40,000 contacts last year, we cover an area far larger than Bristol - a population of around ¾ million. We had 300 visitors to our centre (on St. Nicholas St.), and about 1,300 emails, which is a relatively new service. There was a national campaign in January aimed at the younger people, increasing emails by 50 per cent to our branch.

The Bristol branch will be involved in a pilot scheme of using text messaging. It has been trialled in an another branch, and there are some advantages, particularly when reaching younger people who use texting all the time. We see it as an avenue, where they will make their first contact via texting and then go onto an email or perhaps a call.

Any new developments on the horizon?

There are a number of things that I would like to do, to set up before I stand down this year as director, including developing a more culturally diverse volunteer base. One thing I was conscious of was our volunteers were under-represented in terms of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people. This may be due to the image the organisation is associated with - mainly 'white, middle-aged and middle class' volunteers. Equally of importance was the fact we had very few foreign speakers.

Given the cultural make-up Bristol, BME groups and foreign-speaking groups may need our services; but we may have problems due to lack of experience of dealing with specific cultural ways of dealing with issues of suicide or other social problems, specific to say refugee communities.

As an organisation, which is there for everybody, we are missing significant experience and knowledge in this area. So we want to address this and we are looking for help from different agencies. This is a challenge, and we've got a long way to go with this.

How can people contact you?

By Telephone - 08457 909090 ( local rate) local number 0117 983 1000
In Person -10:30-9:00pm every day at 37 St Nicholas Street, Bristol BS1 1TP
By email - jo@samaritans.org or visit website - www.samaritans.org

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