Volunteering magazine article, issue 117, May 2006
| Joanne Davis tells us about 'The Secret Language of Mentoring and Befriending'
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| When I began a new job at Volunteering England 12 months ago as a ‘Development Officer for Volunteering in Mentoring and Befriending’ it became clear early on that I had a puzzle on my hands. Not only was this magnificent job title too long to fit on business cards and email signatures, but more importantly it always raised quizzical expressions |
At first I put the amusement about my vocation down to friends and family not being in touch with the ways of the third sector… but the questions and raised eyebrows continued. The heart of the problem seemed to be that people didn’t really understand the words ‘mentoring’ and ‘befriending’.
After a thorough assessment of the project plan, I realised that the pesky question of language and definitions could not be skated over but was at the heart of my work. For example, how could I help Volunteer Centres to share mentoring and befriending good practice if they were uncertain about the terms; how could information materials be created on mentoring and befriending if these themes had no currency within the wider public?
To coin the Volunteering Compact, I needed to promote a shared vision of mentoring and befriending. With this resolved, I set out to discover how Volunteer Centres – the shop front of volunteering - currently communicate mentoring and befriending to the public and see if there were ways in which we could develop a future shared language.
Fact File
So why is it important to study the messages that Volunteer Centres are communicating about mentoring and befriending? For one reason, these volunteering opportunities are deeply embedded in the work of the Volunteer Centre network as a 2005 Institute of Volunteering Research report found out:
- 93% of Volunteer Centres hold specific volunteer opportunities in both mentoring and befriending; 6 per cent hold only befriending opportunities and 1 per cent hold only mentoring.
- 5 Volunteer Centres offer over 100 opportunities in mentoring and befriending.
- 66% of Volunteer Centres place mentors and befrienders in the statutory sector.
The second reason why it is important to look at how Volunteer Centres communicate mentoring and befriending to the public, concern best practice. In the past the sharing of information regarding mentoring and befriending has suffered regional variations and un-met needs - the first support structure for this area was only recently established with the 2005 launch of the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation.
- 44% of Volunteer Centres feel that they lack staff or volunteers trained to advise on mentoring and/or befriending, with 12% agreeing strongly that they lacked advisers.
Buddies, Befrienders and Blank Faces
With research suggesting that Volunteer Centres offer a high number of mentoring and befriending placements, yet rate themselves low on specialist knowledge, I was keen to discover how they would address the issue of mentoring and befriending definitions. Would Volunteer Centre staff and volunteers be able to explain the differences and similarities of these roles? Volunteering England convened a series of four Volunteer Centre consultation events in 2005 to find out…
Volunteer Centre representatives attending the consultation events, all brought with them different experiences of mentoring and befriending. Some engaged through brokerage, while others ran supported volunteering or in-house projects. Although there were many excellent insights from staff/ volunteers across the board some views were constrained by the understandable barriers of time and priority.
1) Those running in-house schemes were more likely to focus on the specifics of their project such as client group and level of training - ‘isn’t befriending all about helping older people’.
2) Volunteer Centre representatives involved purely in brokerage - thus seeing one-to-one volunteering as simply one opportunity among thousands – were more likely to have no access to specialist information on the subject and be vague about the roles. One Volunteer Centre staff member even admitted, ‘I have a difficulty with the definitions to be honest’
Despite the internal wrangling, Volunteer Centre staff did reach consensus about some popular mentoring and befriending ‘truths’. These placed befriending as the provision of emotional and social support, and mentoring as the means to change someone’s life through focussed goals and targets.
Building on this lead from Volunteer Centres, I set about creating for the Volunteering England Mentoring and Befriending Development Project, a universal and simple working definition:
Mentoring and befriending
Both are terms that describe volunteers working on a one-to-one basis, supporting people in the community. Both are activities which involve a volunteer offering another person in need a helping hand.
The differences between them include:
Mentoring:
- Is issue based - it deals with problems or changes in people’s lives caused by issues such as drugs, homelessness, unemployment and growing up.
- Is structured into sessions and will be time-limited.
Befriending:
- Is situation based – it deals with those who are lonely or isolated through problems such as social disadvantage, ill health or asylum.
- Is a more sustained relationship that often includes social activities within its sessions.
Simon Cowell – the Face of Mentoring?
Even if Volunteer Centres agree on a shared definition of mentoring and befriending, the fact remains that volunteers and the wider public will still receive a lot of their information about these roles from the media or cultural stereotypes. This information (or misinformation) can impact on the types of people who choose to be mentors and befrienders, and on the roles that are in demand. Are Volunteer Centres aware of the media’s impact on mentoring and befriending and how can they help to tackle misconceptions?
The Volunteer Centres I spoke to about the public perception of befriending had gloomy news. The first problem to be presented was that the term often does not have common currency with the public. One Volunteer Centre claimed to have included befriending as an option on volunteer brokerage forms only to recently change it because they found that new volunteers were ticking it and then saying “we don’t know what that means”.
When people were aware of the term, the story wasn’t much better with Volunteer Centre staff feeling that befriending was judged as ‘middle-aged people having cups of tea with older, possibly housebound people’. The other assumption by the public was that it required no skills and would offer no CV material.
On the other hand, mentoring was judged by Volunteer Centres to be a more familiar term. This was mainly attributed to the media adopting the concept on mainstream entertainment shows. Popular examples – dubiously - were the celebrity ‘mentors’ on Fame Academy and X Factor, while mentoring was also portrayed as ‘cool’ and ‘effective’ through its depiction in teen storylines like Dawson’s Creek.
The inclusion of these roles on Saturday night prime time could be seen as a positive step towards embedding mentoring into common culture; however on the flip side the media has been guilty of only letting through a narrow and stylised view of mentoring which could create a new set of limiting assumptions - ‘mentoring purely involves working with young people’ or ‘mentoring is about career development’'
To overcome off-putting or misleading terminology many Volunteer Centres have been creative with how they present their mentoring and befriending roles to the public. Popular suggestions included explaining the role with language such as ‘offering a helping hand’ or ‘supporting people’. Alternatives included using role titles which sounded friendlier or more explanatory such as ‘partners’ or ‘buddies’.
With the aim of helping Volunteer Centres market mentoring and befriending, I thought I’d trawl Google to find out what the great thinkers of our time have had to say about one-to-one helpers.
Here’s what I found:
- All People want is someone to listen – Hugh Elliot
The meeting of 2 personalities is like the contact of 2 chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed - Carl Jung
- Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen and a push in the right direction – John C Crosby
- To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well – John Marshall
- Mentoring is the most important education in the world - Simon Cowell
Lucky Dip
A further stumbling block on the project has been how mentoring and befriending are presented and classified by the sector. A current trawl on do-it, searching only using the words mentoring and befriending brings up opportunities that read more like a lucky dip than a tailored volunteering search. I found among others:
- Helping out at a boy scouts group
- Running youth club sessions
- Serving food at a luncheon club
The key for a volunteer-involving organisation when deciding whether a role incorporates mentoring and befriending is to ascertain if it involves linking people one-to-one, and whether it incorporates listening - The Mentoring and Befriending Foundation have a design they call the ‘Listening Ear’ incorporated into their logo. For volunteers themselves who worry that the remit of their befriending has expanded, The Befriending Network have produced excellent information sheets that look at boundaries and include lots of real-life dilemmas to ensure that volunteers feel equipped to say ‘no’ to activities that are not a part of their role description.
The Good Practice Bank on the Volunteering England website also stresses the importance of good role descriptions. When recruiting volunteers to be mentors or befrienders consider incorporating these headings (the descriptive element will obviously have to be tweaked to match your project needs):
- Purpose of role: The purpose of the befriender is to provide companionship for a person with disabilities.
- Main activities/tasks The mentor will undertake weekly meetings with an unemployed person to discuss ways of getting back on the career ladder
- Qualities/experience/skills sought: Mentors and befrienders need to demonstrate good communication skills, patience, time-keeping.
Task descriptions are also a good way of assessing whether the role is a specialist or core social care service which should really be undertaken by a paid member of staff rather than a volunteer
How many befrienders does it take to change a light-bulb?
In conclusion, although there are good practice definitions of mentoring and befriending, the most important thing the voluntary and community sector can achieve with definitions is to make the roles sound fun and accessible. A current Timebank campaign has used the tag-line ‘Mentoring and Befriending – Just be Yourself’. This has been shortened for the campaign title BeMe. To date over 1200 people have signed up to the initiative proving that pricking the bubble of jargon and complexity can have real results. Mentoring and befriending are serious roles, but that doesn’t mean that they need serious language.
Further information:
- In answer to the ‘joke’, it should take no befrienders to change a light bulb. Befriending should not include practical tasks, but should focus on people-skills and social contact. Perhaps not one for the Christmas party, back to the drawing board…
- The statistics in this article were drawn from the report ’Mentoring and Befriending: The Role of Volunteer Development Agencies’ by the Institute for Volunteering Research November 2005. Results were based on 122 responses from Volunteer Centres.
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You can find out more information about the BeMe Timebank campaign and sign up to become a mentor or befriender at http://www.beme.org.uk/
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Access the Volunteering England Good Practice bank – with a mentoring and befriending section coming soon
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The Befriending Network training materials can be sourced on their website: http://www.befriending.co.uk/
Interested in reading more articles? Join Volunteering England and receive access to the online magazine, Volunteering.
