Volunteering, placements and internships

We know that people give their time for many different reasons and that their availability varies, so we support our volunteers to give as much or as little as they can.

Where possible, we match volunteers to service users based on needs and interests. Underpinning our approach is a commitment to positive and professional relationships between staff, volunteers and service users to achieve lasting impact.

We provide training and supervision to our volunteers, which includes reflective practice and peer mentoring. This allows volunteers to develop their own skills and strengths, whilst ensuring they are well equipped and supported to undertake their role.

All of our volunteers undertake safeguarding training which allows us to safeguard the children, young people, adults and families we support as well as protecting the volunteers themselves.

Where our services offer student placement opportunities, this can be either on an individual basis or through our collaborations with colleges and universities. For more information and to find out whether this is possible in your area, please speak to the service you are looking to support.

Catch22 offers student placements within its Commissioned Rehabilitative Services contracts, as well as some of its wider justice services. This includes Personal Wellbeing, Finance Benefit and Debt, Dependency and Recovery, Foreign National Service and its Victim Services.

Depending on the team you work with, opportunities might include:

• supporting members of the Interventions Team with their current projects, such as supporting the Interventions Lead to create new interventions, engaging with the Training Lead to learn about how our staff are being trained and helping to create their training packages, and spending time with the Inclusion Lead to learn about how protected characteristics are incorporated into Catch22’s interventions,
• shadowing one-to-one interventions and group sessions with our service users to see what these sessions comprise of and how they are facilitated by our practitioners,
• visiting a Probation Office to learn about the relationship between Catch22 and Probation Practitioners, and
• attending training relevant to the role of a frontline practitioner (subject to what training is taking place during the placement period).

Catch22’s justice services develop interventions using an evidence-based approach, typically using the “what works” model to positively rehabilitate service users and underpin its interventions. We offer volunteering opportunities with the Interventions Team which might include:

• supporting the Academic Partnerships Lead on current research projects, for example by collecting and collating evidence to further indicate “what works” and investigate different aspects of this approach to add to and improve the current evidence base for interventions in support of rehabilitation, and
• working with subject experts to conduct evaluative projects on the current Personal Wellbeing interventions offer; covering topics such as their effectiveness in increasing desistance from crime, addressing protected characteristics, recognising the characteristics which make someone more or less vulnerable to reoffending, and more.

COMPASS is a unique program designed to recruit and nurture university students from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, providing valuable hands-on experience and a springboard for future careers For more information about the Catch22 and COMPASS internships, you can download our handbook.