Home Search Volunteer

How will I be ending homelessness?

We cannot end homelessness by ourselves. To be able to help our members end their homelessness they need to be able to access local, affordable, good quality homes to rent. As a Home Search Volunteer, you will use your knowledge and understanding of the local housing market and organisational and networking skills to support our Housing Procurement/Landlord Liaison Teams to build local relationships with landlords and source good quality accommodation, suitable for our members to make their home.

Within this role, you will also be expected to support with our Housing drop-in sessions, supporting members to search for properties.

What will I be doing?

Tasks you will support the team with include:

• Researching and keeping up to date a database of local landlords and properties
• Identifying potential leads and supporting our team with follow up tasks
• Helping ensure our team knows what properties are available
• Helping with documentation and property checks such as checking for landlord certificates and the rogue landlord registry
• Talking to letting agents and landlords and building relationships with them
• Creating content for team communications
• Record keeping

APPLY VIA CRISIS WEBSITE Register > My Crisis Volunteering

What do I gain?

There is no feeling like knowing you have played a part in helping someone to end their homelessness and create their home somewhere safe and affordable. You will be part of a team committed to ending homelessness by making a direct difference to individual’s lives by improving their access to information and accommodation. You will also have the satisfaction of putting your skills and experience to use in an impactful way as well as opportunities to challenge and develop yourself.  You will have opportunities to undergo appropriate learning as well as to connect with other volunteers and colleagues.

Additional information

To provide a safe, welcoming environment for everyone we provide volunteers with a code of conduct (how we work together). This will be found within your volunteer policy sign off document. We ask all volunteers to read our policy document and always comply with those policies.

Reasonable out of pocket expenses for lunch and travel (where appropriate) will be reimbursed in line with our expenses policy.

We strive to ensure that our services are welcoming, remain relevant and are fully accessible to everyone that we help and support. We are keen to receive applications from volunteers from diverse and other marginalised communities as this helps us ensure the best experience for those that we are here to help. This includes those with lived experience of homelessness.

Skills

To be successful in this role we are looking for someone who:

• Like talking to people and are comfortable communicating and advocating for our members
• Are good at research, persistent and can be resilient when getting a 'no' from landlords. You're able to deal with negativity whilst leaving the door open in a positive manner
• Are comfortable using IT as you will need to update records, create communications, and present information
• Are organised
• Understand the importance of keeping an individual’s personal information secure and private and working within the boundaries of the role to keep everyone safe 
• Are passionate about standing with Crisis and our members to end homelessness

What do I need for this role?

As part of your recruitment, you will need to provide details for 2 referees, and we will complete a basic disclosure check. One of these referees will need to be a professional or academic reference (this could be a reference from a volunteer role).

If you are delivering parts of this role from home, you will need to have access to a laptop/tablet with appropriate security and antivirus and internet access. The role does require you to make calls so we will either provide you with a phone or access to an app where you can make calls on our behalf without sharing your personal details or using your phone allowance.