Priority 4: Capacity

Our ambition

We have the organisational culture, structure, capabilities and funds necessary to deliver impact.

Our challenge

Samaritans is made up of around 20,000 volunteers from all walks of life, hundreds of people with lived experience and 300 staff members. All united in our belief that suicide is not inevitable.

But to reduce lives lost to suicide, today and in the future, we have to adapt to a changing world. We need to provide more flexibility and inspire people to volunteer and work for us.

How we will achieve this

• We’ll nurture a culture in which staff and volunteers feel valued, supported and able to play a full part in achieving our vision.
• Our people will be consistently well trained and well supported to deliver their roles, whether they’re a volunteer or staff member.
• We’ll continuously learn from our staff and volunteer surveys, listening to feedback and addressing concerns to maintain people’s high levels of passion for their role.
• We’ll make sure our volunteering and employment offer attracts and keeps the people we need.
• We’ll explore more flexible models of volunteering and work with our volunteer leadership to find ways to meet changing volunteer expectations.
• We’ll find ways to make recruitment and training easier and improve the retention of new volunteers.
• Volunteer leadership roles will be improved so they’re more attractive and manageable. We’ll make sure roles provide valuable leadership development opportunities and we’ll reduce the burden on individuals by increasing the number of shared roles.
• Working with volunteer leaders, we’ll gradually evolve our structure to improve the capacity and resilience of our service and increase the flexibility we can give volunteers. This will also mean merging some branches, relocating others and closing some branches over time.
• We’ll use technology and explore the role of AI in Samaritans, where it can help improve our systems. But our service will continue to be delivered by volunteers, supported by staff teams – keeping human connection at the heart of Samaritans.