Volunteer
Staffing our Winter Shelter takes a lot of people over the winter, and our warehouse, social supermarket and cooking classes rely heavily on volunteers all year round too. We are always looking for people to volunteer with our:
Preparing, teaching and clearing up after our cooking classes and workshops.
Weighing and sorting donated food, managing stock, assisting with food collections and deliveries in our van, assembling food for collection, sorting donated clothing, bedding and other items.
Staffing our social supermarket, looking after customers, taking payments and keeping the shelves stocked.
One-off projects
Help out with short-term or one-off projects
During the winter months, setting up, cooking and serving food, chatting with guests, doing activities or playing games with guests, cleaning up, generally helping out.
You must be 18 or older to volunteer in most roles.
Many of our volunteers come from hosting and supporting churches, but we welcome volunteers of any background or faith. We do not endorse any of our volunteers using the project as a platform for evangelism: volunteers are free to discuss their faith if questioned by our guests, but are not allowed to initiate discussions of that nature.
Training
Anybody who wants to volunteer with Inn Churches must agree to be trained.
For warehouse, social supermarket and cooking volunteering, you will be trained ‘on the job’. For some roles a food hygiene certificate may be required – we can offer this training if required.
For Winter Shelter volunteering, training sessions (of approximately two hours) will be offered at hosting church venues. Don’t worry if you cannot make the training at the venue you are volunteering with, you can attend another venue of your choice provided that it takes place before your hosting week. Please book early with the hosting church leader. Once you have attended training you will be free to volunteer at any of our hosting churches and can book time blocks which suit your schedule.
How to volunteer
If you are interested in volunteering, please get in touch with us. Please let us know if you have special skills or training in first aid, mental health, or substance abuse. You can then complete our volunteer application form online, or request a printable copy.
You can also help us in other ways.
Volunteering opportunities for businesses
We welcome groups of volunteers from business or other organisations and usually have suitable projects for a team to get stuck into – whether that be working together in our warehouse intercepting and sorting food, cooking in our café kitchen, maintaining our premises, fundraising activities or other one-off projects and activities.
Please contact Juli to see how you can help.