loveisrespect Blog

On October 30th the Helpline staff and advocates celebrated the candy corny goodness of Halloween with a pumpkin carving contest.  Check these out!

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Austin people, we’ve got a new volunteer class starting in October. If you’re interested in becoming a Peer Advocate, answering calls and chats from teens across the country, please contact us. Training covers topics like crisis intervention, safety planning, healthy relationships, etc. We do lots of practice calls/chats with our new volunteers. And there’s always someone around to help. We promise.

Email us. We’ll tell you more.

*To ensure confidentiality for our callers and chatters, peer advocates have to work from our Austin office. If you don’t live in Austin and you’re looking for volunteer opportunities, give us a call. A Peer Advocate can  help you find something in your area.

Our newest batch of interns start today. Interns will continue the huge task of collecting teen friendly resources for the states of Texas and California. It’s an overwhelming and necessary job, and we’re really lucky to have found four new interns ready to take on the challenge. Their projects will help us better help our callers/chatters by connecting them with local resources that can really help. Plus - all of our interns are trained Peer Advocates - they’ll take calls and chats too.

April 27th - May 3rd is National Volunteer Week, a week created in 1974 to recognize and celebrate volunteerism. Since our launch in February 2007, National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline our volunteers have given about 1,800 hours, equivalent to 19,000 dollars in value. Most of our volunteers serve as Peer Advocates, and are between the ages of 16-24. Not only do they complete a 40 hour training, and take calls and chats from those that contact the helpline, but they are also involved in community outreach - they volunteer to recruit other volunteers and promote the helpline at community events in Austin. Recently, our volunteers have participated on behalf of the helpline at the University of Texas Take Back the Night rally and the annual Walk for SafePlace (a local domestic violence shelter).

We appreciate our volunteers all of the time, but we’ll be taking extra steps to appreciate them this week. And if you’re in Austin and interested in volunteer opportunities, visit the Get Involved section of our website for more information.

 Tim Gunn, chief creative director for Liz Claiborne and star of Bravo’s Project Runway, was gracious enough to stop by our office for a visit while in Austin this morning. Tim served as one of the judges for our Dating Bill of Rights video contest last year. Some of our volunteer peer advocates showed up early to demonstrate our live chat for him. Volunteers, staff, (and everyone else in the building) were very excited to meet him.

We had a little Halloween party for our staff and peer advocates yesterday. We ate too much candy, watched some scary movies and had some very creepy visitors…

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Hope your Halloween is (or was) a happy one!