If you are interested in volunteering at Rape Crisis we want you to know that there are several ways in which you could become involved. We run annual training courses for volunteers wanting to work directly with clients either as lay counsellors, as community educators, community activists or as court supporters. If you wanted to do any one of these things you would need to complete our volunteer training programme which consists of the following elements:
- a six week training programme
- one month’s orientation
- five months practical training
Once you have completed these elements you become a member of Rape Crisis and get a certificate. We ask potential volunteers to offer us a time commitment of a minimum of eight hours per month (this does not include a three hour monthly meeting held with all volunteers in a particular focus group) for the period of one year.
Overseas volunteers however are often not available for a full year but come for much shorter stints. These volunteers usually do very practical chores for the organisation which do not involve specialised skills. They might help us paint a room, do Internet searches for potential donors, or do data capture, entering cases into our computer system, or other filing or clerical work. In return we offer them opportunities to shadow certain staff members on the job.
The only other category of volunteer at this stage is people with particular expertise who render a pro bono service to the organisation by donating their expert time to us in areas where we don’t have the skills in house. For example we have had layout artists design a booklet for us, a human resources expert assist us with our performance appraisal process, a researcher create a statistics report for us, a marketing expert help us gain new sponsorship ideas, a website designer review our website and so on.
We operate from three separate offices in Cape Town and depending on where you stay you might want to contact one of them as follows:
Observatory (021) 447-9762
Manenberg (021) 633-9228
Khayelitsha (021) 361-9085
They will take down all your details and send you an application form to join Rape Crisis.
It is important to note that even if you already have skills in one of our focus areas, should you wish to volunteer formally with us and actually become a member you would need to do the training course. The reason for this is that this is how you bond with the other volunteers in your team both new and experienced, this is how you become part of the organisational culture of Rape Crisis and it is an orientation to the specialised field of rape in South Africa.
Our courses are workshop styled experiential learning environments where everyone pools their skills, knowledge and life experience in order to help one another learn and grow so your expertise starts being helpful and right from the word go it is shared with others. If you want to find out more please e-mail our Operations Manager, Nazma Hendricks, at nazma@rapecrisis.org.za.