Schools

Who can be a YOPEY Befriender?

A Partnership YOPEY Befriender is a young person who volunteers to visit a care home near their school as part of a group of Partnership YOPEY Befrienders from the same school. We mainly work with sixth forms but can work with other age groups.

YOPEY can start the setting up of a YOPEY Dementia Befriender Community Partnership for your school by visiting your school and talking to as large a group of your students as you wish, although your partner care home may put a limit on the number of students it would like to have visiting its residents.

Once we have gone through a recruitment process and your selected students have registered as YOPEY Befrienders, YOPEY will train them, either at the care home or your school. We prefer prefer to train them at the cake home, as it gets them across the threshold of a place most have never been to before. It also often means there will be cake and other sweet things for them to eat!

On a more serious note, our training includes a safeguarding procedure that Partnership YOPEY Befrienders are taught to go through if an issue arises. Our aim is that young people, while experiencing things in the care of the elderly that they may never have experienced before, they remain happy in their volunteering.

If the care home requires your students to be DBS checked, we will ask the care home not to charge them for this and we will help your students through this process.

The home may organise a separate induction visit or this may be done at the same time as the training or the DBS applications.

YOPEY may work with your school and the care home to organise a timetable of visits by your Partnership YOPEY Befriender students.

Once your students receive their DBS certificates, they should show this to the care home and they can now start visiting.

Record of volunteering achievement

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Reports

After each visit, each YOPEY Befriender submits a short report of what took place during their visit on their personal accounts on yopeybefriender.org.

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Digital badges

YOPEY personnel monitor the reports to check your students are OK and award digital badges to keep them motivated. If an issue arises, we will contact the student and/or family and school. If unresolved we will investigate with the care home.

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Printable record

In one click on their yopeybefriender.org profile, these visit reports and badges can be turned into a printable record that can be included in university applications, job and apprenticeship applications, and added to CV.

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Document for school

We can also compile all your students’ reports into a single document for your school to show Ofsted and other stakeholders.

Any school or college can apply

Schools and colleges are welcome to request copies of their students’ Records of Volunteering Achievement to present to Ofsted or other stakeholders.

During their time as a YOPEY Befriender, many young people learn that making elderly friends can be a way to learn social history informally and acquire valuable life skills from fundamental human qualities such as empathy to more practical skills like how to care for someone with dementia.

As a small charity based in Suffolk, YOPEY tends to focus our efforts with groups of students from schools and sixth form colleges in the East of England – Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. However, we will consider applications from schools outside these counties and for other age groups of young people and children.

✓ Schools & Sixth forms colleges

✓ Bedforshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk

✓ Will consider applications outside these counties

“Roy supported me in a way friends my age couldn’t, because he had ‘been there and done that”

Teenagers and elderly become friends

17-year-old Kaylee had a new good mate – 82-year-old Roy who did “some cool stuff in his life. We are good mates, we chat about life and each other’s lives”.

Like many YOPEY Befrienders, Kaylee compiled a life story about her much older friend – basically a scrap book with events from the care home resident’s life.

“As we started on it I discovered just how much Roy had packed into his life,” said Kaylee. “He went to art college, then did National Service, was an illustrator for an engineering firm, went into the hairdressing business, sold advertising and ran exhibitions around the world. He’s done some cool stuff including meeting Arab kings and princesses. ”

Thank you for such a wonderful man

Kaylee says YOPEY Befriender also helped her a lot. “Roy supported me in a way friends my age couldn’t, because he had ‘been there and done that’. When I auditioned for a lead role in a school production Roy’s encouragement helped me get it.”

Roy and his wife came to see Kaylee play Sandy in the musical Grease at her school.
Kaylee says YOPEY Befriender “really opened my eyes to the lives older people have led”.

Kaylee was at university when she heard Roy had died. His family invited her to the funeral and Roy’s life story was a feature at the wake and some of its content was used in the eulogy.

Kaylee said to YOPEY: “Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to meet such a wonderful man.”

Teenagers and elderly become friends

17-year-old Kaylee had a new good mate – 82-year-old Roy who did “some cool stuff in his life. We are good mates, we chat about life and each other’s lives”.

Like many YOPEY Befrienders, Kaylee compiled a life story about her much older friend – basically a scrap book with events from the care home resident’s life.

Thank you for such a wonderful man

Roy and his wife came to see Kaylee play Sandy in the musical Grease at her school.
Kaylee says YOPEY Befriender “really opened my eyes to the lives older people have led”.

Kaylee was at university when she heard Roy had died. His family invited her to the funeral and Roy’s life story was a feature at the wake and some of its content was used in the eulogy.

Kaylee said to YOPEY: “Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to meet such a wonderful man.”

“Roy supported me in a way friends my age couldn’t, because he had ‘been there and done that”

References from partner schools

“The partnership between our school and YOPEY has become an integral part of sixth form life. Every year we have an ‘over supply’ of young people applying to be trained as YOPEY Befrienders. The communications skills, patience, empathy the students develop are life skills worth an A level grade of their own.”

Sixth form director

“Young people get far more out of being a YOPEY Befriender than they expect, The experience affects them profoundly. Their entire outlook on society – and how they fit into it – changes. Where other youth placements may focus on professional development, YOPEY goes further in exploring the cross from professional to personal.”

Sixth form tutor

“This opportunity for the young people to develop their range of skills has supported students in their aspirations for future careers and often been the difference between applying for competitive courses and not. Those that have taken part have gone on to university and work with more confidence and a wider range of better developed skills.”

Director of Careers and Outreach