Are you passionate about serving children, young people or adults with disabilities?

A voluntary service with disabled people very often takes place in a disabled home. Some of these homes function with shift work and external nursing staff, but there are homes in which staff and disabled people live and work together.

In this case, it is more difficult to separate clearly work time from leisure time, but it is at the same time a very deep experience. A volunteer’s tasks are roughly the same in both forms of homes.

Furthermore, a volunteer could work in integrative nursery schools or schools, in family support, daily support, living groups, residential homes, sheltered workshops, etc.

Some have severe disabilities and e.g. cannot speak properly or only eat or breathe through medical instruments.

This is why the caring and support is done in a very individual way.

At the beginning, it is often a new and sometimes difficult experience for volunteers to be confronted with the clients’ syndromes.

But usually volunteers get adapted soon, are well integrated into the community and feel enriched by meeting and living with the disabled people.

Possible activities

For you as a volunteer, there are various possibilities to get involved, e.g.:

  • Everyday Live

    Supporting the occupants in their everyday life (shopping, cleaning, cooking, …)

  • Leisure activities

    Own ideas and as helper (walks, making music, doing sports or going on trips, …)

  • Caring tasks

    Washing or getting the occupants dressed, going to the toilet, changing nappies, giving them their meals, …

  • Sheltered workshops

    Supporting them in sheltered workshops (e.g. in the field of textile, craftwork, wood or metal)

How exactly a day is structured and which tasks you carry out can be negotiated within the placement, and can be adapted to your own preferences.

These activities define the daily schedule in this field of work, which depends on the home’s meal times, on the occupants’ working times in their workshops, and on their leisure time.