We are delighted to be recruiting and training our own team of biographers to record the life stories of those who are end of life in hospital or GP palliative care and in the community.
Do you have the ingredients to become a good Biographer?
An engaging personality
The ability to put people at ease
Be empathic, sensitive
Tactful and non-judgemental
Good listener
Do you have experience of volunteering or working in a health care or similar environment?
Do you believe in the power of the human voice, have a passion for storytelling and love working with people?
But that isn’t all it takes. We provide excellent training to make sure that both you - and our storytellers - feel confident and enjoy the experience.
The power of the human voice
“How wonderful it was to have that spoken word on recording to listen to.”
Skip Aitken
Stories for Life Biographer
Working at St Francis Hospice in Romford
Capturing memories to share forever
“I feel privileged….to capture their words, their thoughts, their hopes and dreams.”
John Greenwood
Stories for Life Biographer
Working at St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney
Train your team to become life biographers
The course covers the following:
The benefits of recording a life story
Lots of practical exercises on building rapport and communication skills
Understanding what makes a good biography
The practicalities and process of recording a story
How to listen and developing emotional awareness
Supporting the storyteller
Safeguarding and confidentiality
Having trained Life Biographers on your team offers an invaluable patient-lead service to families and loved ones. Our training is an interactive day long course. We ensure that all of our volunteers are professionally trained.
What happens next?
1. Contact us by clicking on the button below
We would love to hear more about you and discover why you would like to volunteer with us. We like all of our volunteers to have had experience working in health and wellbeing environments; either as a retired professional or volunteer. Some of our volunteers have been nurses, counsellors and social workers and we would love to hear about you.
2. We train you to be the very best
Our training is led by professionals who have worked in the health care environment for several years. It covers safeguarding, confidentiality and is GDPR compliant. The focus of the training is very much on the patient who we call the storyteller and a successful recording relies on your excellent listening skills.
3. We support you throughout
Once you are trained as a biographer you become part of our team. We will keep in touch through newsletters and focus groups and we invite you to share your experiences in a confidential environment. We are always available to offer support and guidance.
You are an organisation that cares for those who are end of life. We’d love to chat with you.
We are delighted to be working with many hospices nationwide already. Our service is free of charge.
We partner with hospices and specialist organisations to train and support your volunteer team to record the life stories and precious memories of patients in your care.
Our new expanded mission offers our service to all those who are end of life no matter where they are receiving care. By training your team to record life stories or linking with our own specially trained biographers you can offer an invaluable additional service to your patients. We would love to talk to you about how our training works so that you can expand your service to patients.
We’d love to hear from you.
Get in touch below or write to us here.
Stories for Life
Head Office
25 Combemartin Road
London
SW18 5PP
We’d love to hear from you
If you’re from a
hospice
If you’re
from an
organisation
If you’re a family
member
If you’d like
to tell
your story
If you’re from a
charity
If you’d
like to
volunteer