Community Support Worker
Bournemouth / Poole / Christchurch – 3 days / 21 hours per week (Specifically Tuesday / Thursday / Friday)
We are looking to recruit a dedicated, motivated, and energetic individual to join our team of Community Support Workers, providing help and support for visually impaired people in Dorset to maintain healthy, independent and socially active lives in their local community.
This role will be to work specifically with our members through social clubs and activities and overseeing the volunteer recruitment and management process in BCP.
Working from home and spending a lot of your time out and about in the community, this is an exciting opportunity for someone to bring their skills and personality to the role and help shape and develop future services for our members.
So, if you are someone who can become passionate about wanting to help make a positive difference to the lives of blind and partially sighted people in Dorset and will enjoy the satisfaction of knowing you are achieving that, then we really want to hear from you.
Key duties include:
- Run several monthly social clubs in your given area with outings and activities
- Assess and react to the needs of our service users
- Actively promote all Dorset Blind Association services and promote the value of
our membership scheme
- Recruit, retain and support good quality and motivated volunteers
- Take over the management of volunteers already in your area
- Communicate regularly with all service users and volunteers
- Match and introduce volunteers to service users making each aware of good
practice guidelines
- Monitoring of the service and accurate record keeping and reporting
- Entering information on to web-based database (training will be provided)
- Attending community events and networking with other charities, agencies and
professionals
- Raising the profile of the Dorset Blind Association generally and acting as its
representative within the community
Person specification:
We are looking for someone with as many of the following skills and experience as possible, although training, mentoring and ongoing support will be provided.
- Living in BCP area
- Happy working from home and out and about in the community
- Disciplined and organised and able to effectively and efficiently plan and
structure their own working day for maximum productivity.
- Motivated to work alone and to deadlines
- Able to work unsupervised, but keeping effective and regular contact with line
manager and colleagues
- Flexible and resourceful to meet the various and often changing needs of the
charity and our service users and to fit in with club activities and outings
- Outgoing personality and able to relate to and deal effectively with people on
many different levels
- Willing and able to act as an advocate and promote the charity to potential new
service users, volunteers and other supporters.
- A basic understanding of sight loss and other physical and mental health
disabilities.
- Experience of working with older people and those with a disability and
confident to help service users with mental health needs
- Experience of recruiting, working with and managing volunteers
- Good written and verbal communication skills and a good working knowledge of
MS Office
Salary: £16,020 (actual)
Access to own reliable transport is essential
An offer of employment will be subject to a satisfactory DBS check, receipt of two satisfactory references and the person appointed will serve a probationary period of six months. Applications for this post can be made by sending your CV and a covering letter to Miss Leah Cross by email leah@dorsetblind.org.uk
Rev your engines – the countdown is on for the Dorset Blind Association Motor Show. We are back at Lulworth Castle for a very special year, celebrating the show’s 10th anniversary!
We were delighted to officially open our newest Dorset Blind Association shop in Sherborne on Friday, 20th March 2026, with the support of the local community and our special guest, Mayor Jill Warburton, who kindly cut the ribbon and gave a lovely speech.
