Texting © The Samaritans
The Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation provided a grant of £25,000 in 2007/08.
Samaritans provides a 24 hour, confidential, non-judgemental emotional support service to those experiencing feelings of distress or despair. Anyone can contact us by phone, email, letter, face-to-face at our branches, at festivals and through our work in prisons.
In 2004 research showed a need and demand for an emotional support via a text message service, and in 2006 they began piloting their SMS service.
The Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation grant helped further development of the SMS emotional support service and this has made a tremendous impact on its work.
New training materials have been produced for volunteers learning to provide emotional support via SMS. The grant has also enabled Samaritans to produce Caller Care guidelines for when their volunteers provide emotional support by text message. Both training and caller care are essential for ensuring that vulnerable people using the service obtain an appropriate level of care when they contact Samaritans.
Since they launched the pilot of its SMS service, they have received over 295,000 texts from 5,300 unique callers and it’s only with the support of trusts and foundations like the Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation that they have been able to respond to these calls for help and start rolling out the SMS service to our branch network.
“It felt very safe to text… I was able to build up that trust and felt reassured that it is ok to talk, that I'm not a bad person for doing so. I really appreciate the support so much, probably more than you'll ever know.”
Samaritans SMS Caller, 2007
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