Finding a befriending or mentoring service
A befriending service matches a volunteer with a person who is lonely or isolated, for regular and ordinary company: a visit at home, a walk, a shared cup of tea, or a call at an agreed time.
Anyone looking for a befriending or mentoring service, for themselves or for a parent, a neighbour or a friend.
Your time. People often give up after two or three dead ends, and the dead ends are predictable.
A search for a service near you returns a national head office and a page last edited years ago, so you conclude nothing exists locally. Usually something does. Its name contains none of the words you searched for, and it sits in a council directory that search engines index badly.
The standard dose is an hour a week, or an hour a fortnight, and a telephone match is usually a weekly call of 20 to 45 minutes. Almost every befriending service in the United Kingdom is run locally, covering one town, one borough or a few wards, which is why “befriending service near me” has a real answer and no national one.
Kept Company is a reference. It does not list, rate or recommend individual services and it cannot arrange anything for you. What it can do is explain how the landscape works and give you the four routes that find what exists where you live.
Why there is no single national list of befriending services
No national list of befriending services exists because nobody has the job of keeping one. Befriending is not a regulated activity with a register, unlike a care home or a fostering agency, so any group of people can set a scheme up and thousands have. An out of date list is worse than none, because it sends a worried person to a number that no longer answers.
Three things make the gap permanent. Funding is local, so a scheme paid for by one council takes people only from that area. Eligibility is local, so one scheme covers adults over 65 and another covers care leavers. Naming is local, so the service you want may call itself a companionship scheme or a good neighbour scheme, with the word befriending nowhere in its name.
Four routes that actually find a local service
Four routes find a local befriending or mentoring service, and between them they cover almost everything that exists. Work through them in order: each holds a different part of the picture.
1. Start with the local council
Contact the adult social care team, or search the council’s community directory, often published as a local offer or a wellbeing directory. Councils hold this because they commission some of it. In England the Care Act 2014 lets an adult who appears to have care and support needs ask for an assessment, and prevention services including befriending sit within what a council may arrange or signpost to. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own social care law, and in Northern Ireland the function sits with health and social care trusts, not councils.
2. Ask the GP practice for the link worker
Ask at the surgery whether the practice has a social prescribing link worker. In England link worker posts sit in primary care networks, so most practices have access to one but not all do. Scotland has community link workers in many practices, and Wales and Northern Ireland have comparable roles under local names. Their job is to connect a patient to non clinical support such as befriending or walking groups. For an older adult already known to a practice this is the quickest route, because the link worker holds a live map of what exists and can make the referral for you.
3. Go to the volunteer centre or Council for Voluntary Service
Contact the Council for Voluntary Service or volunteer centre covering your area. These are local infrastructure bodies whose purpose is to know every voluntary organisation in one place. In Scotland the equivalent is the third sector interface, in Wales the county voluntary council, and Northern Ireland has volunteer centres covering council areas. They know the small independents no search engine surfaces, including faith groups and networks built around a single estate.
4. Use the national charities’ own branch finders
Use the local branch finder on the website of a national charity that runs befriending, rather than ringing a national number. These charities work through local branches or partners that are often separate registered charities, so what runs in Leeds may differ entirely from what runs in Glasgow under the same brand. The branch, not the national office, decides.
| Route | Best for | What it will not do |
|---|---|---|
| Council social care or directory | Care needs as well as loneliness | List groups holding no council contract |
| GP practice and link worker | An older adult known to the practice | Help someone registered elsewhere |
| Council for Voluntary Service | Small, unbranded local schemes | Assess eligibility or refer for you |
| National charity branch finder | Telephone befriending, town coverage | Mention independents it does not run |
Befriending, mentoring, or something else
Befriending and mentoring reach you through different doors, so name the one you want before you ring. Befriending is company offered for its own sake, with no goal beyond the relationship, most often arranged for older people, disabled adults, carers and people leaving hospital. Mentoring is company with a purpose attached, usually for a young person, and it is reached through a school, a youth service or a children’s charity, almost never through adult social care.
Youth mentoring is the one place where length is not negotiable. The ask is 12 months, because matches ending before three months are associated with outcomes worse than no match at all (Grossman and Rhodes, 2002). A six week mentoring block for a referred child is not good practice.
What to ask before you agree to anything
The befriender or mentor
- Comes at the agreed time, and tells the coordinator when they cannot
- Is checked before the first meeting, through the Disclosure and Barring Service in England and Wales, PVG scheme membership in Scotland, or AccessNI in Northern Ireland
- Keeps to what the match agreed, and takes anything outside it to the coordinator
- Handles no money, bank cards, keys or medication
The person who would be supported
- Says what they want, which may not be what the family wants for them
- Gives consent themselves, and may decline without giving a reason
- Asks how long the wait is likely to be, and asks again if a month passes
- Says early if the match is not working, rather than letting visits stop
The scheme carries the relationship, not the volunteer. Before it takes your details it should tell you who it covers, by area and eligibility, say whether it charges, which from a charity is normally no, and name the coordinator you ring when something is wrong. It assesses, matches, trains, supervises and closes matches, and that coordination is 60% to 80% of what a match costs to run. A service that cannot say who supervises its volunteers has told you something.
The person needs help today, not company in six weeks
Befriending is not a crisis service. Where someone is at immediate risk, in mental health crisis, or without food, heating or medication, contact the GP, the council’s adult social care duty team or the emergency services first. A coordinator asked to take a crisis referral will decline it, correctly, and the week spent waiting is lost.
Volunteering, and the other reason people search this
Volunteering enquiries reach the same four routes, because the organisations running befriending services also recruit the befrienders. Expect 6 to 12 weeks from application to first meeting, most of it references, checks and training. This site carries no vacancies, no salaries and no provider directory.