How can we help trainee counsellors?
We offer placement opportunities to students training to qualify as counsellors.
You must be on your counselling Diploma with an external supervisor and you will need to be CRB checked at enhanced level.
The Child Protection Officer can organise Police clearances if you do not have a CRB check valid within the last 3-6 months but there might be a charge which you will have to contribute towards.
At the moment we receive client referrals for people both under 16 and for adults and this is offers you a valuable opportunity to gain experience counselling children and young people and with adults.
We receive between 5 and 20 referrals a week and can therefore guarantee client work with the client population you need in order to qualify.
No volunteer will ever be pressured by OPEN MINDS to take clients which do not count towards their qualification.
We will also provide internal support through the Managing Director and Head Counsellor who will arrange to meet you for 30 minutes to an hour per fortnight, at times convenient to you around your client work with OPEN MINDS.
We also offer a library of counselling related books as a resource to help counsellors although there is a small fee to borrow books and loss of any book will require reimbursement to OPEN MINDS. The list of books is available upon contacting us. The book list will increase as and when funding becomes available.
We will also provide training in house on a variety of subjects but attendance will not be compulsory.
FUTURE SERVICE PROVISION
We intend that we will act as a referral service between placements, supervisors, therapists and clients, students or counsellors seeking these services
This is a new service which we will begin to pilot.
The idea is for trainee counsellors to sign up to our services and give us the criteria they look for in a placement such as location, client group and such information as the student’s availability, the client load they can manage and similar. We will then match this to placement opportunities and vacancies, from whom we will obtain their criteria for what they look for in trainees’ availability and etc. We will do the same for trainee/counsellors to supervisors and to personal therapists. We hope in this way to assess agencies and provide a quality framework by which students can choose to volunteer at different placement organisations.
We may charge monthly for this service to counsellors/clients and to the agencies registered on our list. This income will then be invested in the organisation to help us improve our services to clients and to counselling trainees.
We do not know if this will work but we feel that student counsellors need an organisation they can turn to for support and for assistance, especially in the initial stages of their Diploma when they are feeling overwhelmed about the demands placed upon them.
We hope to alleviate some of this stress and in doing so generate good word of mouth about our own services and hopefully some
income to help us continue our services too!
