Help us empower more children to save lives, just like Henry did

Little LifeSavers is a UK-wide charity offering free basic lifesaving skills to schoolchildren in Year 5 and 6 of Primary school, and Year 7 and 8 of Secondary school. 

Our charity’s vision is to reach every child in Years 5 to 8 throughout the UK with these simple skills, so that they can take appropriate action should they ever need to, and not have to stand by unable to assist because they did not know what to do. It is our hope that a child in Year 5 would receive this training annually through to year 8. Repeat exposure to the skills helps embed them and increase confidence to use them if needed.

But it is an enormous task. There are approximately 3.7 million children in 28,000 schools within our targeted range, so we need a lot of volunteers and fundraising support. If each school had a small pool of volunteers that were willing to teach every two or three months between them, we would achieve our vision and create a nation of Little LifeSavers.

Currently, bystander CPR provision is only 30% and survival from Cardiac Arrest in the community stands at 10%. Early CPR from bystanders has been shown time and again to save lives. Volunteering with us equips you with the skills to assist immediately should you need to make a difference.

One of the children we taught recently, Henry, went on to save his father from a cardiac arrest. The man returned to work six weeks later. Our Chairman had the pleasure of interviewing the Henry and his parents, you can see our interview with them here www.facebook.com/LittleLifeSaversCharity/posts/2857026597891350 

How does Volunteering work?

The sessions we teach take approximately one hour to deliver, and we ask our volunteers for a minimum commitment of Four sessions per year to schools local to them. That is only 4 hours a year as a minimum. You do not need  to be medically trained or have a formal CPR qualification, we train and support all our volunteers.

The skills taught in the session are as follows:  

• Management of choking in a child 

• Child Hands-only CPR 

• Adult hands-only CPR  

• The recovery position. 

I’ve never taught before and I don’t have any formal CPR training, Can I still volunteer?

We welcome people who are formally CPR trained to volunteer, but it is not a requirement to be able to be a volunteer instructor with Little LifeSavers. Learning our simple model and agreeing to teach it exactly as laid out is all that is required. Formal CPR training provides far more than our simple bystander skills model and is therefore not necessary. Because it is our aim to reach as many children as we can with our simple skill set, we need to recruit as many volunteer instructors as possible throughout the UK. It is neither feasible nor necessary to formally train thousands of adults when the model we teach is so simple.

How Often Should I Volunteer to Teach?

The short answer to this is as often as you can – because it means we can teach more children and it is good practice for you as a volunteer instructor – especially when you have just started volunteering with us. Ideally we would ask for availability of all our volunteer instructors for a half day once a month and we only teach during the school day and in term-time. The minimum commitment is providing four sessions a year – or once every three months. This helps volunteers to stay confident to teach. Volunteers who do not teach for six months will be required to attend a Zoom Training session again to refresh their memory for the training model.

How can you help?

We are asking for businesses who offer charity partnerships and employee volunteer days to contact us to learn more about our charity and discuss how they can help us.

We are asking schools to introduce us to PTAs so we can work directly with them for volunteer recruitment drives.

If you would still like to help but are not in a position to volunteer or offer corporate partnership opportunities we welcome donations and additional fundraising activies. 

If you are able to donate, and only if you are able, please do so here https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/donation-web/charity?charityId=1014575&stop_mobi=yes

Please do leave a message so we can thank you and Sussex Business Times for their support.

info@littlelifesavers.org

0300 3035252