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
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£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’ 201 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.
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.