LGBT Youth Scotland

I’m James White I’m the national volunteering manager for LGBT Youth Scotland. So that’s a paid position, I’m employed full-time to oversee the volunteering of LGBT Scotland. And I think my role is about making sure that volunteering at LGBT Scotland is as good as it possibly can be in many different ways that you can do that. We have got volunteers all over the country at the moment. We’ve got over 100 volunteers, typically at any one time it’s somewhere between 100 – 120 volunteers and has been that level for the last 2 years. So we’ve got volunteers all the way up from Inverness, all the way down to Dumfries and the borders. We have, for the most part, about 75% of our volunteers help us run youth groups, so there are youth workers within youth groups. We have got a range of other roles as well. We’ve got a digital youth work service so young people can get advice and support online. We have a live chat facility on our website; they can also text us and email us. We’ve got volunteers that help us with research. We’ve got volunteers involved in our policy work. We’ve got admin volunteers. We’ve got a talent pool so that volunteers are able to dip in to ad hock activities. If there’s an event coming up, if we’re doing some fundraising and we need some people to hold collecting tins, if we’re doing a fundraising ceilidh, or something like that, we can send out a message to our talent pool and invite people to get involved. And it’s very much a ‘on this day we’re planning to do this kind of activity and we need somebody that’s able to do this for us, can you help us?’ And we’ll send that out to our huge talent pool. And volunteers can then say ‘yeah I’m available to help with that’ or they might say ‘I’m not free for that day but let me know of the next thing’.

My name is Jordan I volunteer for LGBT Youth Scotland and I currently assist a Wednesday group.

My name is Randy Lopez, I am from the States, Texas specifically, and I volunteer here at LGBT Youth Scotland in Edinburgh. I have been a volunteer on and off for about 1 year, just got back from the States and going to be a volunteer again.