Our Goals for 2010
To continue to implement the New Strategy for 2009 by setting up another formal partnership with Bournemouth Churches Housing Association (BCHA), which is a much larger organisation than those we are already in the process of forming partnerships with (Firstpoint, Chrysalis).
Alan Kenny from BCHA sees the service that Samaritans offer as complementing that offered by BCHA, in that Samaritans provides a dimension of care that meets immediate, real need in the vulnerable people that BCHA support.
Partnership agreements for us involve finding local organisations with whom we can join to provide better services to the people that are our priority groups. In this way we hope to not only reach more people who need our help, but also to provide support and training to the people within partnership organisations that provide care to those that need help.
BCHA have already agreed to refer vulnerable people to us, especially where contact is required outside of their office hours. We expect these contacts between the hours of midnight and 8am. The highest proportion of contacts received by Samaritans, both nationally and locally, is between midnight and 6am, and we will need to ensure we can maintain our current levels of service during these critical hours.
BCHA cover an area from Plymouth in the west to Oxford in the north, dealing with people of all ages, who, for whatever reason find themselves without permanent accommodation, money, etc. These people usually have many emotional problems and staff often do not have the time to talk at length with them. Our core service has always been the provision of emotional support 24 hours a day, and we can therefore provide customers of BCHA with the emotional support that they need, outside of office hours.
An escorted visit for us to a number of BCHA locations is planned for October 2009, after which we will consider the most appropriate venue to suit the needs of individuals, Samaritans, and BCHA, where our volunteers can have a regular presence to provide emotional support. Planning, preparing, funding, and administering a Samaritans presence on BCHA premises will form the focus of our main goal for 2010, in alignment with the New Strategy for 2009. We hope to use our experience from developing a partnership with BCHA as the template for agreeing partnerships with other organisations in the area that service our identified priority groups.
