Children's Activity Support - Group Helper (Supporting Children and Young People with a Disability - Armagh)

Barnardo’s is committed to providing ‘Better Outcomes for More Children’. Our children’s services volunteers help the charity to deliver essential services in local communities, providing support to over 300,000 children, young people and their families. This role provides a great opportunity to join our fantastic children’s services and help make a real difference.

PosAbility are recruiting enthusiastic volunteers to join the team of project workers within our service. We work with children and young people aged 8-25 years old who have a diagnosis of a learning/physical disability and or autism. Children and young people with disabilities can face many barriers to their inclusion in decision making processes. This can be due to barriers to communication, learning, physical or sensory impairments. Our project aims to facilitate the inclusion of children and Young People with disabilities in the decisions that affect them.

Volunteers help our service to involve children and young people to have their say on issues that impact on theirs and their families lives. This means that disability services are more likely to meet the needs of children and young people with disabilities and their families.

You will join a dedicated team who have the responsibility for developing and facilitating individual and group work with children and young people who have a range of physical, learning and sensory disabilities.

Your role will be to support group work with children and young people with a disability; organizing and running our regular groups. We have a number of programmes that run throughout the month, these take place mostly in evenings and weekends or during the school holidays, however we also have some opportunities during the daytime in the school term.

Key activities:

• Encouraging young people take part in capacity building activities

• Increasing understanding through various mediums including; art, drama and IT.

• Identifying methods which enable individuals to communicate their views.

• Help young people to participate in local decision making

• Help facilitate the young people in 1-1 and in group sessions with guidance from Barnardo’s Staff

• Support young people to engage in discussions and decision making forums using IT/video conferencing

Please note: This role requires an Access NI Enhanced check with child barred list. It is a criminal offence to apply for this role if you are barred from working with children or vulnerable adults.