THE Samaritans have launched an appeal to recruit more volunteers from West Devon to help maintain their phone lines 24 hours a day and continue providing a listening ear to people in crisis.
National Samaritans Week runs this week and the group is celebrating a recent lottery grant to help it get its message across to more people.
The Samaritans of Plymouth, East Cornwall and South West Devon hold discovery evenings, where people who feel they may like to become a volunteer can visit the centre, watch a video and find out more about the organisation.
Branch director Mary Sargeant said: 'Samaritans are ordinary people who have the capacity to listen to anyone and anything and not judge people.'
Publicity officer Carole DeMuth added: 'We need new volunteers all the time. We need to tell people what Samaritans do. There is still a lot of confusion about what we do.'
The range of support offered by the Samaritans is diverse. They provide training to other organisations both voluntary — St Luke's Hospice — and commercial — BBC Radio Devon. They give presentations to secondary schools as part of personal and social education course.
They also train listeners — prisoners at Dartmoor prison who offer support and advice to vulnerable inmates. Samaritans visit the prison each week to support the listeners and provide further training to allow them to help prevent suicides and incidents of self-harm.
The Samaritans are constantly looking for new volunteers to help. One look at the facts and figures demonstrates the extent of the challenge in keeping the centre running to provide help to callers in crisis.
l To run the Plymouth branch costs £55 a day. The Samaritans receive no Government or local authority funding.
l Branch members are not paid for the time they give to the Samaritans. Last year, volunteers nationally gave three million hours of time providing confidential emotional support to callers — an average of 183 hours or 26 working days per volunteer.
l In the year to July 31, 2001, the branch received 30,029 calls and 932 visitors. The branch has around 100 listening Samaritans, each answering an average of 300 calls during the year. The length of call varied from a few minutes to more than four hours.
l In the 12 months to July 31, calls were up 20 per cent on the previous year, which confirms that people with feelings of distress or despair continue to need the vital service.
Mrs Sargeant said the strength of Samaritans was that the service was available, with at least two Samaritans on duty in the branch, throughout the day and night.
'People never get an answering machine with us, there is always a real person they can talk to,' she said.
Few volunteers have any previous experience of the roles they take on, not just as listeners, but as members of the training, speaking and prison support team.
The Samaritans are also looking to set up a friends' group, to raise funds and take on some of the workload of listeners, freeing them to spend more time talking to people who really need emotional support.
The Samaritans of Plymouth, East Cornwall and South West Devon are located at 20-21 Oxford Place, off Western Approach in Plymouth. Their telephone number is 01752 221666, or people can contact the national helpline on 08457 909090.