A Massive well done to our Lend An Ear volunteering team, winners of the Community Superhero’s award!

Some of our lovely volunteer’s & volunteer manager attended North Ayrshire Council Health & Social Care Partnership breakfast for champions & became community superheroes. They had a fabulous morning at this prestigious award ceremony.

We are so proud of our team & are delighted that they are receiving the well-deserved recognition for this invaluable service we are providing. Our volunteers give their time to try and make someone else’s day just that little bit brighter!

“I’m always blown away at the dedication of the ladies involved in the team. They are all volunteers that give up a lot of time every week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to come in & call between 30-60 people. Many of those people are vulnerable & have a lot of complex issues which they offload onto our volunteers. Our volunteers carry the weight of a lot of people’s problems & these ladies are carrying it with great dignity. They always approach their work with a smile on their face & I’m just really impressed that there’s still people out there that give so much of their time & themselves to help other people.” Jane Lamont: Beith Trust CEO

Our team work endlessly providing a support & befriending telephone service to isolated, vulnerable & lonely clients of all ages throughout Ayrshire.  Alison Berry Volunteer manager & Lend An Ear project leader & her team are always looking to extend the service & provide support to new clients. To make a referral or self refer please follow the link below.

Referral Form

I would describe myself as confident, strong and outgoing but I usually keep myself to myself and not talk about the things going on in my life. I have a very big imagination and my creative skills are very good. My friends would describe me as loud, crazy and “not right in the head”. I like to go out every weekend and spend time with my friends and during the week I spend with my mum.

I use social media to keep in touch with my friends by mainly using snapchat, Facebook and Instagram because to me, these are the apps I enjoy using more. I like to shop online and read blogs written by my family. Social media helps you to express how you feel through posts you share without having to say it out loud. Using social media I can keep myself up to date with events I’m going to and look at pictures of the places my friends and family have been to. My experiences with social media have been good ones as I tend to keep myself out of trouble online and keep all the drama to reality. I would like to work as a social media assistant because I like writing and taking pictures and I feel like that would help me a lot with wanting to become a journalist. I’m hoping to take away better social skills as I don’t normally speak to people that is don’t know or haven’t spoken to before, I also don’t like being in an environment that I’m not used to so I’m sure this will help a lot with that.

I got to work with multiple people with completely different personalities, all of them unique but everyone was so welcoming and always had something for me to do. I made an adventure trail that everyone loved and also made a leaflet on all the events that Beith trust hold, I took a lot of photos in and around the Geilsland estate. I helped out at the play day on Friday and I was cooking in the kitchen on Thursday.

Working in the kitchen was unique, I think of myself as a good cook but when I walked into the kitchen I was greeted with many different and strange ways of cooking. I’ve always stuck to the traditional ways of cooking but I was showed easy and quicker methods to make lasagna. I’ve never made lasagna before but I had a rough idea of how to do it from watching my mum in the kitchen.

We made four lasagna’s two of which were your normal traditional lasagna, another was a vegetarian lasagna and the last one didn’t have pasta sheets.For the two normal lasagna’s we started off Frying the onion until it was soft then we added the mince and cooked it until it was brown. This is where one of the weird parts come in, next we added lentils, salt and pepper and mixed it about. Once it was mixed we added tomato passata, chopped tomato and then mixed some more. We then added even more weird things, sugar and tomato ketchup. To finish off the mince we added all the herbs and give it one last mix. We made the cheese sauce and started to put the lasagnas together. To make the vegetarian lasagna we used the same cheese sauce but instead of using the mince filling we used vegetables. We listened to music while working, and the best part was when Gerry Cinnamon came on.

At Play Days we worked alongside the children and took photos of the activities they took part in, we had a big soft play and a bouncy castle for them to play on. We also had push bikes out and the kids had a blast pushing themselves about and of course they had their helmets on. Healthy snacks were given to the kids, even the parents had a great time with tea and coffee in the kitchen they were all set for the fun.

I got to work on computers a lot which is something I’m not very used to. I used publisher to work on my newsletter and got to see how you can put the same post in different social media platforms using hootsuite, I found this very interesting because I didn’t know you could do that. I also got a crash course in photoshop, and used a lot of other office programs that will come in handy throughout school. The officer environment was far from boring, if anything it was the exact opposite. I helped out with admin and marketing and picked up a lot of great new skills that have helped me figure out the path I would like to go down in future.