Volunteering England has featured LifeSIGNS within its Volunteering Magazine!

Here’s how the interview went.

Q Please could you tell us how LifeSIGNS started?

A I ‘Came Out’ about my self-injury and started seeking help when I was at University; I started writing my personal thoughts on my own website and then I realised I had to do more than just rant about my own personal distress.

I launched LifeSIGNS in May 2002 with some great friends, and since then we’ve grown and grown, and I’ve met and worked with some incredible people.

Q What kind of services do you offer?

A We believe that people have come to realise they can be open on the Internet, and so we’re a ‘virtual’ organisation.

We provide a wealth of inspiring ideas on our website, and some in-depth articles to help people reflect on their self-injurious behaviour and their emotional state.

We also send out a free e-Newsletter which is beautifully produced and on to its 30th edition now! Being online, we’ve linked up with Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and all that sort of thing to help LifeSIGNS reach out to people.

We also blog regularly. We have our own vibrant Message Board, which unlike some of those random forums you find online, is stable, safe and well moderated.

When it comes to real-life work, we provide self-injury awareness training around the UK, and we speak at conferences.

We’re privileged to have our ideas considered by the NHS, CAMHS and Counsellors, and we’re pleased to visit organisations to share our perspectives.

We also offer a range of Factsheets for download, together with our Guidance for Schools Self-Injury policy that is already being circulated around 200 schools across Ireland.

Q How many volunteers do you have and what kind of roles are they involved with?

A LifeSIGNS is completely user-led and volunteer run. I am the founding director of LifeSIGNS and I run it with my colleague, Jules. But of course we also benefit from the hard work and dedication of several volunteers like our Message Board Moderators, and the volunteers who help run our Facebook and MySpace profiles.

Our website and Newsletter articles are often written by myself or Jules, but we also publish people’s essays, stories and poetry and are very grateful for contributions from our memberbase.

We will expand our core management team to four or maybe six later in 2008.

Right now, I guess seven of us are involved with the running of LifeSIGNS and our web services, but we’ve had twice as many as that in the past and I know we’ll grow in number over this summer.

On top of this, we also make use of a ‘Guidance Group’ where our members can submit suggestions and guide the strategy of LifeSIGNS overall.

We are looking to expand the membership and powers of the Guidance Group this year; LifeSIGNS is already user-led, but we want to hear from more people, people who may not want to volunteer per se, but wish to have their voices heard.

While the management team adhere to guidelines and our constitution, we don’t demand anything formal from our volunteers. However, many of them have worked with us for years and we wouldn’t be surprised if they became part of the management team one day.

Q Where do you recruit your volunteers from?

A We recruit from within our own ‘memberbase’. We’re not always looking for volunteers with personal experience of self-injury, but we are looking for people who know our work and our values.

We have a popular Newsletter and Message Board, and so when we ask for help or for new volunteers, our members come forward.

We’re very well connected to people, not in a faceless corporate manner, but on a personal level. Our members really get involved with our projects and web services, so we often get to know people and they help us long before they become an ‘official’ volunteer.

Q How do you train, support and supervise your volunteers?

A Depending on the task, a volunteer might need training, or might just need a hand every now and then.

With regard to the training we deliver to the NHS and organisations around the country, we have a real one-on-one development process whereby an experienced trainer teaches the ‘training package’ to the new volunteer trainer, and they each attend one another’s training sessions until they both feel that the new volunteer is ready to represent LifeSIGNS in the field and can cope with the stresses of talking to a room full of healthcare workers!

It can take several sessions over several months. I’ve personally trained two volunteer trainers, and I will be training my colleague Jules this summer.

Other tasks, such as managing our Message Board or Facebook Group only requires online support and supervision. This might be on a daily basis, day or night, but we can trust our volunteers to be discerning, plus, we consider Facebook and Bebo to be reasonably ‘safe’ spaces on the web.

Our volunteers know they can email or ‘message’ us at any time and we’ll respond very quickly – they often ‘check’ with us about things, just to make sure.

Q How do you thank your volunteers?

A All of our volunteers have a personal drive to raise awareness about self-injury and emotional wellbeing, so we’re partners in the same game really.

We look after our volunteers by keeping them in the know about LifeSIGNS projects, and asking for their input regarding the organisation’s direction.

We might give them little things, like stickers, or we might invite them to write in our Blog – empowering things like that.

We want our volunteers to feel part of LifeSIGNS – after all, while I own the LifeSIGNS organisation, I’m a volunteer too!

Q What are you plans for the future?

A We’ve just re-vamped our Mission Statement so we’ve got our eyes on the horizon right now. We’re not the same as other faceless organisations – when you get to know LifeSIGNS, you get to know everyone who’s involved.

This year we’re raising funds so that we can print some leaflets – it’s important we have some offline material as well as all our online stuff.

We’ll definitely be increasing the size and scope of the management team. We are swamped by requests and overloaded with information at the moment – there’s too much work and not enough ‘us’ to go round.

We’ve been ‘bigger’ in the past, so we know what to expect as we expand again.

There will be a lot of time spent developing organisational procedures and boring things like that, but it’s all to support the awareness work that we do throughout the year.

We’ll be speaking at more conferences this year, and it’s always fantastic to ‘network’ with people in real life – you never know who you might bump into and who might become a lifelong supporter.