Volunteering with us
The charity is entirely run by volunteers. We are based in the centre of Ipswich. All sessions take place at our office at 19 Tower Street.
We train volunteers from all walks of life, who are able to give an hour of their time to work one-to-one with a student each week. We train the volunteers on our system, give advice on running a session, safeguarding adults and how to support our students.
Over half of our volunteers are retired and many have come from an education background but we also have people join us from other backgrounds; librarians, retired heath workers, charity workers etc.
We provide community and purpose for our volunteers and a way to use their skills in retirement. We are a small and friendly charity. We would love to hear from you.
How do we help our students?
The majority of students need to start from the very beginning. We use an award winning phonics based approach which is also dyslexia friendly that guides non educationalists through the teaching process called “Yes we can read”.
Yes We Can Read offers an easy and accessible approach to helping someone with reading. It guides both the volunteer and the student, you do not need to be a trained educationalist to help someone learn to read.
What training would I get?
You will be asked to attend a training session of around 4 hours, you will be assigned a mentor who will help you until you feel confident running a session. There is also a resources co-coordinator who will help you to find the resources you might need and to discuss the needs of your student.
We also arrange monthly sharing sessions around particular subjects for all volunteers to meet and get to know each other and share their experiences. Subjects might be resources, structuring a session, playing games or dyslexia for example. We also sometimes bring in outside speakers who are experts in their field. We regularly invite the Suffolk Dyslexia Association to give advice.
There is always someone to ask if you need help, even our most experienced volunteers sometimes ask for ideas and suggestions.
Next steps
Get in touch, we will send you an application form and more information about volunteering with our charity. We will arrange a chat to talk about why you want to join us and answer any questions. If you are still interested in joining us and we think that you will be a good match for our charity we will invite you to our next training session. In the meantime, we will give you the dates of our informal sharing meetings with volunteers and you will be very welcome to attend them and get to know us a little better.
See the contact us page for how to get in touch or email us: info@gottoread.org.uk