40 Faces of Brendoncare – Maria Wallser

As Clubs Training Manager, Maria Wallser trains volunteers to provide support across Brendoncare homes, community services, central office, and online as well as over the phone.

With her background in children’s social care services, Maria has brought her skills for caring to this position where she has developed Brendoncare’s comprehensive programme of essential training for volunteers.

She works in tandem with Yildizhan Negargar who trains our Chair-Based Exercise Champions, Digital Champions and Online Volunteers.

The core of Maria’s role is ‘keeping volunteers, members and residents safe’. She does this is through the training she has developed over her 14 years at Brendoncare. She explains: “As part of our core programme every volunteer completes an online Induction and Safeguarding training, before moving onto more role specific topics.”

Confident:

In addition to face-to-face Health & Safety and First Aid training that Maria facilitates, Dementia Awareness is becoming increasingly popular. Training is also provided to help people have ‘Confident Conversations about Mental Health.’

It is clear the passion that Maria has for her role as she speaks with such enthusiasm about how she has expanded the training offered and how she loves regularly visiting key Brendoncare locations, such as the Gosport Centre, to facilitate such events.

“We have groups and clubs there every day which has created a community within the community. Volunteers help at clubs, but they also attend the clubs too, it’s something really special.”

By helping at locations like this, volunteers maintain the accessibility of clubs so that members can attend as much as possible and enjoy what Brendoncare has to offer. “We have husbands and wives that go to clubs together and the friendships that have been made there are amazing.”

Demographic:

Since she started at Brendoncare in 2010, Maria has noticed an interesting shift in the way people volunteer. ‘The demographic of volunteers really shifted during the pandemic. Before, it was mainly older people wanting to volunteer to fill their time and give back to the community.”

While older people still make up the majority of volunteers, Maria says: “Since Covid, we’ve seen an increase in students and younger people signing up to be volunteers.”

She mentions how lots of students volunteer specifically with Brendoncare’s Telephone Support Service, creating ‘great intergenerational friendships’ through weekly telephone conversations.

Value:

Much of Maria’s daily role involves organising training and planning for events, such as Fall Prevention Training for the upcoming Fall Awareness Week which runs 16th – 20th September this year. She explains that, through events such as this, Brendoncare is “trying to make a huge shift in the depiction of the ageing process, to show that we need to value older people more.”

She mentions how the media can often paint the ageing process in a negative light: Brendoncare is actively working against this ‘to influence the general perception.’

Positivity shines off her, and in Maria’s eyes, it’s clear why more and more people are volunteering at Brendoncare – “Brendoncare is fundamentally the most caring organisation I’ve worked for. Colleagues here all care about each other and I work with a fantastic group of people!”