Join Us - Terms and Conditions
These are the terms and conditions under which we supply and make yopeybefriender.org available to you. By paying the joining fee, you will be invited to register on yopeybefriender.org which will enable you to take part in Virtual YOPEY Befriender or YOPEY Dementia Befriender, or a combination of both.
Please read these terms and conditions carefully before paying the £24 joining fee. These terms and conditions tell you who we are, how we will support you, and other important information.
YOPEY Befriender is directly managed by YOPEY, an official charity with registration number 1145573. Its registered office is at Woodfarm Cottage, Bury Road, Stradishall, Newmarket CB8 8YN.
Cost
- A joining fee of £24 is payable. We accept payment via credit or debit card via our website yopey.org. You will not have access to yopeybefriender.org until we receive payment. Once we receive payment, you will be given the go-head to register on yopeybefriender.org.
- Joining on Yopey.org is open to any young person aged 13 to 24. We will ask for your age when you register on yopeybefriender.org. Once you have registered on yopeybefriender.org we will send you more information including examples of things you can do for your volunteering and a consent form. The consent form needs to be signed by a parent or carer if you are under 18, or yourself if you are older. A photo of the signature page needs to be emailed to hello@yopey.org with your name in the subject field before we will start working with you on your volunteering.
Communications
All contact will be via email or telephone. All contact from the YOPEY charity using your personal data will communicate useful and relevant information to either help you further your YOPEY Befriender volunteering or help the charity improve the quality and breadth of its volunteering.
We will only use your personal information in accordance with our privacy statement. Please read it carefully as it includes important terms which apply to you.
Activities and Evidence
You are responsible for selecting which activities to do and, accordingly, accept any challenges and risks that may go with them.
Volunteering with YOPEY as a Virtual YOPEY Befriender or YOPEY Dementia Befriender broadly splits into different areas, although you can choose to items from more than one area
Area 1
As a Virtual YOPEY Befriender you can:
- write letters to care home residents
- compile activities for care home residents to do, such as word searches
- share artworks you have created
- film videos of you doing something entertaining for the elderly to watch
You send all the above content to hello@yopey.org for us to check and add to packs of content by young people that we send to thousands of care homes.
The majority of videos are of young people playing musical instruments or singing, particularly songs from yesteryear. Think Vera Lynn and Frank Sinatra rather than Adele, but if you have a great voice and only know modern songs, give that a go. Other young people do magic tricks or tell (clean) jokes or read a poem or a passage from a favourite book. Still other young people video themselves on time-lapse making an artwork or baking a cake. Or, they can video themselves giving a guide tour to the care home residents to a place they know well.
Area 2
As a YOPEY Dementia Befriender you will find a local care home that is happy to be visited by you. You will then go into that care home ideally weekly and speak with residents and/or take part in activities being put on by carers. We strongly recommend that you take a 45-minute course to become a Dementia Friend. You can find your local courses on https://www.dementiafriends.org.uk. Volunteering with people living with dementia can be risky as they can be aggressive (although not all of them are) and we want you to be as prepared as possible. That is why we recommend you become a Dementia Friend. The care home you arrange to visit may also offer dementia courses. Ask to take part in these.
You can choose to be only a Virtual YOPEY Befriender or do some or all of the activities listed in Area 1 and visit a local care home from Area 2. Most young people choose to do one or two of the virtual activities while they contact local care homes to see which one is prepared to accept their visits.
Your Record of Volunteering Achievement
Each time you do anything from Area 1 or 2, or even each time you contact a local care home, you log on to yopeybefriender.org and submit a ‘visit’ report. That way you will be building up your Record of Volunteering Achievement and being awarded digital badges by our assessors.
Our assessors will contact you if they feel they can help you improve your volunteering. We also want to read in your reports if anything upsetting happens in the care home. If something upsetting happens in the care home you are visiting, you should ask the first available member of staff to explain what happened. If you are not satisfied with their answer, you should speak to the home’s manager or another senior member of staff.
YOPEY recognises that the behaviour of some people with dementia, or the way they are treated by carers, can seem upsetting. We do not want you to be upset. To prevent you leaving the care home upset, we ask you to seek an explanation for what you saw and might have been involved in. If you go to the manager and are still unsatisfied with their explanation, we ask you to put this in your visit report, and we will contact you.
Cancellation of Purchase
As a consumer, you have a right to cancel your Joining Fee purchase and receive a refund of the £24 if you inform us of your intention not to volunteer with YOPEY within 14 days of the date of your paying the £24. Please write to YOPEY Cancelation, Woodfarm Cottage, Bury Road, Stradishall, Newmarket CB8 8YN. Please enclose a letter giving your reason for cancellation as this will help us to improve our service. We will refund you by a cheque in the post providing the date of the postmark on your letter is within 14 days of your order.
Our Responsibility
We will provide Virtual YOPEY Befriender and/or YOPEY Dementia Befriender to you with reasonable care and skill.
We are not responsible for anything that happens to you in a care home, and anywhere else you carry out your YOPEY Befriender volunteering. We will do our best to prepare you for meeting people living with dementia by recommending you become a Dementia Friend and asking to take any training that the care home may offer. But even if you follow our recommendations we are not responsible for what happens to you in the care home. How you volunteer within the care home is down to the arrangements you make with the care home’s management and staff. When a care home agrees to have you visit its residents, it might be an idea to arrange to meet the manager or another senior member of staff before you start visiting the residents, and, if you are under 18, take along a responsible adult before you start visiting alone or with other young people (if more than one young person from your school, college or university become YOPEY Befrienders).
We are also not liable for business losses. Your use of Virtual YOPEY Befriender and/or YOPEY Dementia Befriender must be personal and non-commercial. If you use Virtual YOPEY Befriender and/or YOPEY Dementia Befriender for any commercial or business purpose we will have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
Fee waiver
YOPEY will consider waiving the £24 fee, or reducing it, if an applicant is disadvantaged. We will consider waiving our fees for a group of young people from the same school if that school is in a disadvantaged area, but in this case a senior member of staff at the school must contact us first.
General
If you have any queries or complaints please contact us via https://yopey.org/contact/
These terms and conditions are governed by English law. You and we both agree that any claim arising from these terms and conditions shall be dealt with in the courts of England and Wales.
Declaration
I have read and understood the information above. I am thirteen years old or over and have not yet reached my 25th birthday. I understand these terms and conditions and format of my volunteering with Virtual YOPEY Befriender and/or YOPEY Dementia Befriender and how my volunteering is supported by YOPEY.