Brighton & Hove LGBT Switchboard’s volunteer community is diverse, skilled, and central to everything we do. Our volunteers contribute across the whole organisation, from frontline service delivery to operational support, ensuring that LGBTQ+ people can access safe, inclusive, culturally competent help when they need it most. Volunteers bring lived experience, compassion, and specialist skills that strengthen our services and deepen our connection to the communities we serve.

Volunteers support Switchboard in a wide range of roles. Operational volunteers provide essential behind the scenes capacity, offering administrative support, IT expertise, data handling, communications, and marketing skills that keep the organisation running smoothly. Their work ensures that our services are visible, accessible, and delivered with professionalism and care.

We also involve volunteers in governance and lived experience leadership. Our Lived Experience Advisory Boards and community panels bring together LGBTQ+ people with diverse backgrounds to shape strategy, influence decision-making, and ensure our services remain grounded in the realities of those most affected by inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. Their insight strengthens our cultural competence and ensures our work is genuinely community-led.

Service support volunteers play a vital role across our specialist programmes. In our bereavement services, volunteers offer compassionate listening and peer support to LGBTQ+ people navigating grief and loss. In our older LGBTQ+ and dementia services, volunteers help reduce isolation, build connection, and create safe, affirming spaces for people who may be facing multiple layers of marginalisation. Volunteers also support our gambling harms work and TNBI social prescribing service, offering identity-affirming, trauma-informed support that helps people feel understood, respected, and able to access the help they need.

Across all these areas, volunteers help build resilience, reduce isolation, and create the kind of community-led support that research consistently shows is essential for LGBTQ+ wellbeing. Their contribution is not simply operational, it is transformational. Volunteers make Switchboard’s services possible, and they ensure that LGBTQ+ people across Sussex and beyond are recognised, supported, and never left behind.