August - Listening Post

It is now more than 20 years since a group of Christian professionals saw the need for an affordable counselling service in the Gloucester area.  This has developed over the years and now Listening Post has branches in Gloucester, Cheltenham and Stroud, where almost 70 trained counsellors offer their services without pay.  Our reception staff are also volunteers, most of them from local churches.

We have a small group of paid staff, all of whom work part–time; a Chief Executive Officer, a Personal Assistant, three centre co-ordinators, three office managers and a finance officer.

Demand for our service remains high, with 54% referred by GPs, and other NHS professionals. Many of our referrals are people suffering with depression and anxiety and many complex family issues. There are many reasons for this: relationship problems leading to divorce and separation, childhood abuse of all kinds, bullying at school and at work, and redundancy. Among teenagers, there is also the growing threat of cyber bullying and addiction to the internet, and this is causing emotional damage to young people.

Clients find great benefit in being able to talk about and work through these difficulties with a counsellor, and discover a new confidence and energy to live more effectively. They often speak positively about how they have changed and made a new start, and it is tremendously rewarding to see this happen over a period of time. Some clients work for several weeks or months, and sometimes spend over a year in counselling. Others can be helped in just a few sessions.

Our needs at the moment are as follows. For many years our paid staff have existed on very low salaries. Recently the Council of Management decided that we should give all paid staff an increase of 3%.  The next step is to set up a pension scheme for them, which we have been unable to do before.  And the step after that will be to raise their salaries to an acceptable level.

We would be most grateful for any help you can give towards this target.

We also need more volunteer receptionists, and for people to join our training courses to become counsellors. (See the Listening Post website.)

Yours in Christian fellowship - Sue Ingleby
(Chair of the Council of Management)