Purpose of the Blue Sky Trust Volunteering Programme:
Our Volunteer Programme was created to strengthen and sustain lived experience leadership and involvement across all areas of Blue Sky Trust’s work.
Our volunteering programme is designed for People Living With HIV and their Allies. Its purpose is four-fold:
1. Amplify the lived experience voice ensuring people living with HIV shape, influence, and co-design/co-deliver services, training, and strategic development leading to improved services and reduced HIV stigma.
2. Improve and develop employability skills, providing structured training, supervision, and opportunities that build confidence, develop new transferable skills, and pathways into employment or further volunteering.
3. Increase wellbeing and social connection, creating meaningful roles that enhance purpose, belonging, and peer connection, contributing to improved mental health and reduced isolation. Beneficiaries will also experience reduced self-stigma, and improved wellbeing outcomes
4. Increase scope, capacity, quality and sustainability of Blue Sky Trust’s services, by mobilising the skills, knowledge, passion and experience of volunteers.
Volunteering at Blue Sky Trust (BST) benefits both individuals and the organisation.
For individuals, volunteering helps reduce isolation by creating social connections, friendships, and support networks. It provides valuable peer support, improves mental health and wellbeing, boosts confidence, and gives a sense of purpose and achievement.
Volunteers also gain access to information, advocacy, role appropriate training, employability skills, and community involvement, while developing important skills such as communication, teamwork, boundaries and confidentiality.
You don’t have to be living with HIV to be a volunteer: allies play an equally important role by bringing their lived experience form other aspects of life.
For Blue Sky Trust, volunteering ensures that people living with HIV are actively involved in shaping services and decision-making processes.
Their lived experiences contribute valuable insights, helping to strengthen teamwork, improve understanding, and create a more inclusive and supportive environment across the organisation.
Types of Volunteering:
The Power of Peer Support
Peer support is at its most effective when people need connection, understanding, hope, and encouragement from someone who has genuinely “been there”. It turns lived experience into a source of strength, helping people feel less alone and more confident about moving forward.
The Power of The Lived Experience Voice (PLS)
Lived experience influences policy by bringing authentic, real-world knowledge into decision-making. It helps policymakers create more responsive, equitable, and effective policies that better meet the needs of individuals, families, and communities.
The Value of Peer Mentoring
A peer mentor has often travelled a similar path. They understand the impact of symptoms, treatments, uncertainty, stigma, fluctuating health, and the practical realities of daily life. This creates a type of support that family members, friends, clinicians, and managers, however well-intentioned, may not always be able to provide.
The Value of the Lived Experience Voice in Training
When the lived experience voice is meaningfully included in training, it helps create learning that is not only informative but also compassionate, reflective, and focused on improving outcomes for the people services are designed to support. Ultimately, it turns training into a shared learning experience where professional expertise and personal experience work together to create deeper understanding and better practice.