Iain Rennie Hospice at Home (IRHH) are delighted to receive a grant of £9398 from The National Lottery Awards for All programme to help finance the recruitment and training of more volunteer bereavement supporters.

The grant will allow us to establish an additional bereavement training course for bereavement volunteers, to include telephone training and an email support system, enabling us to extend and improve our training and facilities so we can provide a Rolls Royce service to individuals and families, tailored to suit the needs of each individual case.

The IRHH Family Support Team offers a wide range of pre and post bereavement strategies including one-to-one work, social support groups and children's workshops, and the course this grant enables us to run means we can further extend our bereavement service.

Receiving this grant means IRHH can now contact professional, specialist bodies such as the Samaritans and the Telephone Helpline Association with a view to receiving formal, expert support training for our volunteers, tailored to our own requirements as a hospice service. We will also be able to purchase 2 new PCs that can be uniquely set up for trained volunteer bereavement supporters to respond to emails from people requiring our support.

With the growing use of emails worldwide, this may be the method by which people prefer to contact our service, as they can communicate when they want, any time of day or night, without any personal interaction with a bereavement supporter, which some people find daunting when it comes to sharing their concerns or problems. Some people subsequently feel more comfortable speaking to and meeting with the Family Support Team, having made the initial contact via email. The PCs will have their own space in our offices, making it possible to recruit volunteer bereavement support workers who don't have their own PC, or for whom working at home would not provide the necessary working environment.

All of IRHH's volunteers are trained to the highest standard and work alongside our paid staff, and they all carry out their work with the required mandatory supervision. With the help of this grant we are able to purchase more copies of the recommended publication to which each of our volunteer bereavement supporters is referred during their initial training, and can cover any expenses our volunteers may incur through their work and for further training.

Awards for All is the small grants scheme administered by the Big Lottery Fund on behalf of Lottery good cause funders, Arts Council England , Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund and Sport England . The scheme makes awards of between £300 and £10,000 to grass roots community groups and voluntary organisations.

For a full list of award recipients visit www.awardsforall.org.uk/england/news.html

5th October 2007