Projects and Campaigns

Samaritans currently receives less than 2% of income from Government and Statutory sources.  The majority of our funding comes from individuals, trusts and companies, without whom we would not be able to carry on providing an emotional support and emotional health promotion service.

Ongoing Support

• £75,000 will help provide local support for a quarter of our branches for one year, including specialist programmes aimed at reaching those at high risk of emotional distress or suicide in their own communities.

• £60,000 enables us to run our Festival branch for one year, providing the opportunity to take our volunteers to events throughout Britain and provide a 24 hour Samaritans service.

• £20,000 can help pay for 24 hours of Samaritans total operating costs, enabling us to provide our emotional support service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

• £6,000 will help to keep our Correspondence branch running for one year, so people who feel unable to express themselves over the phone can write to us when they are experiencing feelings of distress or despair. 

Current Projects

Samaritans are running a number of projects for which we need ongoing funding:

SMS text messaging

Following a successful pilot, the emotional support via text messaging service is being gradually rolled out to Samaritans’ 202 branches throughout the UK and Republic of Ireland.  From the start of the pilot in April 2006 to the end of 2007, Samaritans received over 258,000 text messages from people experiencing feelings of emotional distress and despair and this was achieved with no active publicity of the text message number.  We need funding for various areas of the roll out to ensure that the service can continue.

Evaluation

Samaritans is undertaking a ground breaking project to evaluate it’s emotional support services.  Partially due to confidentiality and partially due to the very nature of our service it has always been difficult to measure the impact Samaritans’ has on our callers. Yet, in order for us to learn what effect our services have on people and to improve and grow, an evaluation of the emotional support services is urgently needed. 

The research that we are carrying out has never been done before and the benefits for us, our callers, the academic sector and other charities are immense.  As a result of the evaluation we will have much better information about how Samaritans makes a difference to people’s lives rather than relying solely on anecdotal evidence.  We want to put the caller first when it comes to developing our existing and future services and in order to do this we must better understand the impact we have right now.

Volunteer Training Schools

• £10,000 will enable 17 new branch directors to attend a training weekend which equips them with the skills they need to manage the huge workload and responsibility that they take on voluntarily.

Volunteers are the very essence of Samaritans and on-going training is needed to ensure that they have the skills they need to carry out the role.  A number of training events and weekend are organised centrally.

We hold schools to provide training for new directors and chairmen, branch visitiors, our regional representatives and we hold an annual conference for over 1,200 volunteers where there are a variety of seminars held providing a wealth of background information for new volunteers.

It is essential that we provide training for our volunteers so that they are confident and comfortable in providing an emotional support service.  We need to recruit and train 3,000 volunteers each year to ensure that the service remains available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For more information please contact Corporateteam@samaritans.org or telephone +44 (0)20 8394 8288.