As you’ll most likely know, Volunteers’ Week is a national celebration of everything that's great about volunteering. And while of course we’re grateful for everything you do for our community every day, Volunteers' Week is a chance for us to really shout about it from the rooftops.
From 1-7 June, organisations throughout the UK will be talking about the impact their volunteers deliver. But we believe you, our MS Society volunteers, are the best of the best. The MS Society was created by volunteers in 1953, and our volunteers remain more important than ever.
With MS Awareness Week coming up on 19 – 25 April, it’s been incredible to hear from our community about their experiences of talking about their condition with others.
For many people, opening up about their MS can be challenging, whether that is to a friend, family or employer. So, through our survey, we’ve been finding out how common it is to keep MS a secret, and what the barriers are to speaking out.
This summer, we’re launching a new service we’ve developed that will provide tailored and targeted information and support to people with MS. It’s called the Digital Health Assistant and will email people information about symptoms, treatments and wellbeing that’s tailored to their needs.
We hope the Digital Health Assistant will make a real difference to people living with MS. We used insight from people with neurological conditions including MS to design the Digital Health Assistant. Now we need people with MS to test it.
To ensure we recruit volunteers fairly, and apply the appropriate screening checks, we’re making some changes to our DBS (Disclosure & Barring Service) checking requirements. This will affect the roles of Support Volunteer, Lead Support Volunteer and, in some circumstances, Group Coordinator.
Because the law is different in Scotland, these changes will only apply to England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
After such a difficult year, people living with MS have never needed our support more.
So, it’s fantastic news that the Bristol & South Gloucestershire Group has received £10,000 from the National Lottery Awards for All, to enable it to continue funding its valuable partnership with Citizens Advice.
Running from 19 – 25 April, MS Awareness Week is a chance to stand up and speak out about living with MS. And, since we often hear from people with MS that talking about it can be tough, we wanted to focus on the barriers people face when opening up about the condition.
End of life charity Marie Curie estimate that more than three million people have been bereaved since the pandemic began. Many of those affected haven’t been able to say goodbye properly, or to grieve. And even those who haven’t suffered a bereavement have had to deal with the sadness and isolation that comes from being apart from loved ones.
We know that, with the gradual easing of lockdown, a number of groups are keen to restart their face-to-face services, and are awaiting guidance on how to do this.
Where are we now?
So far, only England has announced a clear pathway out of lockdown. Once the devolved nations’ governments have also announced their lockdown-easing plans (and we’ve had time to fully understand them) we’ll be able to share our plans for supporting groups (if they wish) to restart their services safely.
Some of our groups have recently been asking for help to assess grant applications. This might be because they don’t have enough volunteers to form a grants panel, or because someone who’s part of the Coordinating Team needs a grant but is worried about their privacy.
In our last Community Networks email on 12 February, we informed you of work taking place to resolve some issues on our website. These issues are concerned with how local events and services are pulled from the Portal onto groups' pages on the main website, which is done by an automatic update that runs every evening.
Unfortunately, delays from our developers mean these issues are yet to be resolved.
