If you have a few hours a week or even a few hours a month to spare for heartfelt volunteering, the Greater Trail Hospice is asking for your help.
The organization visits homes from Rossland to Genelle to Rosspur, and each year puts a request out for those who may feel called to bring comfort to others in their time of need.
Volunteer training sessions are held over four days in the Kiro Wellness Centre, this year on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 and Oct. 14 and Oct. 15.
“Everyone gets the same training,” explains volunteer coordinator Tina Ihas, noting the sessions are two half days and two full days (Fridays 5-8:30 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.)
“You’ll learn about communication and the physical things people experience as well as the emotional things they experience. You’ll get some tools to deal with that, and how to work effectively with the people,” she added. “We have a pretty good success rate with our training - the vast majority of our volunteers that do go through the training stick with volunteering with hospice in some aspect.”
Greater Trail Hospice currently has 30-plus volunteers on its roster, but more are needed, and not just for home visits.
“That may sound like a lot,” says Ihas. “But we have some who volunteer a lot, some who volunteer a little, and some who only come into the office - so it’s a wide variety of skills and mind sets we are looking for.”
Ihas reminds those interested that there is no time commitment to volunteer with the Greater Trail organization.
“If you want to do it once a month or even once every few months or every time we have a client - we don’t require a specific time commitment like some hospices do.”
For those who do chose to volunteer with hospice, the benefit can be very rewarding.
“It’s such an honour to be with someone at such an intimate time in their life,” she said. “That’s what all our volunteers say - the ones that do chose (to sit with a hospice client) get a lot of peace from it.”
For more information and to sign up for the training sessions, call 250.364.6204 or email info@trailhospice.org.