ME Free For All. org Placement Scheme/Work Experience

In addition to welcoming individual volunteers of both sexes, all age groups, from all backgrounds, ethnicities and including people with mental or physical disabilities, which we can accommodate here in Downend, or via Internet links, using their own computers at home, ME Free For All. org is pleased to be able to offer placements, or work experience, which may be suitable to a variety of people, especially students looking for practical experience towards their academic qualifications.

You will probably see, from a look around our website,  www.mefreeforall.org, that we are a charity with no funding whatsoever. Our website and all our hardware is given to us and all our volunteers work for no pay, But you will probably also see that, as well as getting down to the serious business of representing people with M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis - Try saying it: Myalgic, means to do with the muscles, encephalo - hard or soft "c", up to you - the brain and spinal cord and the -itis bit means inflammation), we have time for some fun. See OUR TEAM, for example, on which you may appear some day. And, apart from our side-splitingly funny joke of the day (!) on site, we have two groups of jokes delivered to e-mail addresses every day. One is a pure as the driven snow; the other is a bit on the rude side. Our volunteers range from about 19 to over 70. They come for all sorts of reasons: some because they are unemployed and looking for work but like a reason to get up in the morning and keep their hand in, others are retired but would like to offer their free time, some need to get out of a lonely house and some can't get jobs because of a chronic mental or physical illness which we can often accommodate. We get a great deal out of them but it's not all one-way traffic. Some earn themselves a good reference which helps to secure paid employment -- and loses us a good volunteer -- but those who are not looking for work make some new friends and learn a few things on the way.

Placement Task Examples

Website Design

The design of our website has always been deliberately relatively basic for at least two reasons: (1) People with M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) sometimes have problems with eyes and cognition and could not tolerate small print, fancy type styles, hard to read colours and moving images and (2) since we have a mobile population of volunteers, newcomers need to be easily able to understand how things work, so they can take over when the baton is handed to them, However, we would like someone to add appropriate colour and zest to the site, e.g. some graphics, pictures. boxes around text etc.

Photos

We would like someone to build an easy-to-access library of photos of (1) Our team of volunteers (a) individually and (b) in groups. These are handy for our own website but also to accompany press articles. (2) The International M.E. community. including M sufferers. doctors and researchers from all over the world who wish to send their photos to put in a gallery on our website for a new project called, "What am I like? What are you like?"

Databases

A thorough review of all the databases we use, including (1) all our own volunteers' details (2) M.E. contacts (a) in the UK and (b) Worldwide. Especially important is a quick-to-access Media Contacts Database of (1) national/regional newspapers (a) editors, (b) newsdesks and (c) letters editors; (2) TV stations and (3) radio broadcasters. We are also compiling the biggest ever collection of data about people with M.E. (a) in the UK and (b) globally and need a new system to cope with this -- a very exciting for one or more volunteers to grapple with.

Thorough Membership Review

Although membership of ME Free For All. org is free and although it is unlikely that we would have any mischievous or sinister behaviour from anyone joining, we would like to formalise our membership enrollment procedure. This would include: (1) requiring more detail about each member (a) upon original subscription and (b) with the voluntary option to offer more information later, principally for research purposes; (2) to require log in (which could be auto-saved, it they wish) to read certain parts of the site.

Communication

It is important that we are able to communicate quickly and efficiently with our volunteers, (1) so that everyone is well informed and up to date and (2) so that there is no wastage of double handling by people unnecessarily doing the same thing twice, or each thinking that someone else has already done something which, therefore, remains undone, We need to use the best ways of allocating work to volunteers. Currently, we use Google Notebooks, which works satisfactorily for us but we are constantly exploring new methods and software to achieve better and better results.

Forums & Social Networking

To set up and get running a new project we call -- wait for it! – "More rabbit than Sainsbury's ... Watership Down and Beatrix Potter put together!" We have discovered that people with M.E. need very different ways to communicate with each other and we want to offer them EVERY conceivable option, which they can turn on when they want and off when they cannot manage it, or choose not to speak to a particular individual. We also want them to be able to reach a more local population who could help with shopping, taking them to hospital; the doctor. or dentist, getting prescriptions etc., as well as visiting those who are housebound or bedridden. So we need a huge network, including forums on our site, use existing social network sites, like My Space, Facebook, Bebo etc, as well as more traditional one-to-one methods of e-mails, instant messaging; VoiP, such as Skype, webcams etc.

Remote Working (especially for disabled people)

We have discovered there is a huge number of people, who would like to volunteer to work for ME Free For All. org but are unable to come to us because they are housebound or bedridden because of a physical illness, or have a severe psychological illness which means they are unable to leave their home. It is a shame because these people have so much to offer. It would be a great help for us if we could reach them and it would be therapeutic for them. We think that the most basic, convenient and economic way to make contact would be via Skype and a cheap webcam but heed advice about alternatives and setting everything up. We also need to reach a bigger army of volunteers who, because of other commitments have only limited time to spare - maybe only 1 hour a week - which we are calling "Hour Team" (They'll probably get the same stick as "Our Team"!).

Analytics & Statistics

A rather neglected part of our work (because we are always so busy with the day to day running) is keeping an eye on the website visitor statistics. We do have Google Analytics but we would like a more thorough idea of the total number of visitors and a breakdown of who and where from, frequency etc. to help us evolve in optimum ways.

You tell us what to do

Finally, we are often unable to ask for things that may be helpful to us, simply out of ignorance of what is available, or because we just don't know the vocabulary or how to ask. We would be delighted if you suggested new ideas to help our organisation, which we may never thought of without your knowledge and expertise.

Thank you for considering being a volunteer with ME Free For All. org

I do hope that we can do each other a favour.