Celebrating our wonderful volunteers

3 June 2025

This week marks Volunteers' Week, a UK-wide celebration of the incredible contributions volunteers make.

Our volunteers play a vital role, bringing their skills, knowledge, and passion to enhance our services and improve the lives of those we care for. We invest in their training, support, and development, ensuring they make a meaningful and valuable impact.

Zoe Dodd, our peer support lead, thanks all of our volunteers for their work in this video message and blog. Zoe also leads the engagement team, which includes volunteers.

And throughout the week, we’ll be highlighting the stories of our volunteer heroes. Craig Cleeton explains how he loves being a volunteer with us and Rachel Grellier will share how she finds volunteering interesting and fulfilling. Have a read of these blogs which will be shared later this week.

This is a time to celebrate the fantastic volunteers we have at SHSC, Sheffield and the wider NHS.

It is a pleasure to work so closely with our volunteers and recognise all the amazing work they do. They play a vital role in supporting our service users and teams and make a positive impact.

Over the last year our volunteers have been involved in so many projects including working with chaplaincy, our older adults services, the Short Term Educational Programme (STEP) and on key transformation projects within the Trust. Our volunteers also contribute to numerous groups including co-chairing service user and carer groups. We also have patient safety partners who do some incredible work and their input is invaluable. Rachel Grellier, one of our patient safety partners, has shared her experience of this in a blog so watch out later this week for that.

I am really proud of our volunteers, but there is so much more we can do to expand our volunteer workforce. We are currently working with our partners at Sheffield Flourish to share expertise and to see how we can support volunteers and offer more exciting opportunities for people to volunteer with us.

We are incredibly grateful for all the work our volunteers do and they live and breathe our values every day. Thank you from me, the board and everyone at SHSC for everything that you do.