Due to increased demand, current supporter group Mary’s Snowflake Creations are looking for volunteer knitters and crocheters to join the team. Catherine and Winnie create beautiful knitted and crocheted items for us, and have raised over £7,000 since 2014.
Catherine said: “After many years of unexplained and ‘strange’ ill-health, I was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis in 2012, after a particularly severe brain stem attack left me quite poorly with significant disabilities.
It’s estimated that there are around 130,000 people in the UK living with MS, plus a further million people with a close connection to MS. By comparison, our total MS Society community of supporters (volunteers, campaigners, fundraisers, advisers, donors, etc) is around 180,000.
Last year we told you about the new online and offline experience we were developing for our MS community in relation to our membership changes. This experience is called For you.
As part of For you, we’ve been busy working on a new digital platform to give existing members additional online benefits and provide new joiners with an enhanced experience on our website. And we’re very excited to announce that it will be launching in June to existing members!
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.
