The end of the year is approaching and you might be thinking about goals you want to set for 2023, skills you want to develop, or ways you can give back to the community. If so, the Spring Lifeline Support Worker Training might be a good fit for you! Do you want to work on your communication skills and become a better listener? Do you want to support people, whatever they may be going through? At TELL, we want to be able to offer more hours of service on the Lifeline and to do that, we need more volunteer support workers. Can you help us build towards our goal of offering 24/7 support to the English speaking community in Japan?

The program involves an initial 10 week online course teaching the listening skills and how to apply them effectively on both the phone and chat platforms. Each week of the course you would be watching presentations; completing reading; writing a journal; completing a role play to practice your skills; and joining a weekly seminar. There are roughly 8-10 hours of work each week.

Trainees also need to complete an apprenticeship period, which involves supervised shifts on the lifeline and longer role play practice on set topics. Typically the training takes 4-5 months to complete in total.

Key dates:

Online Course: Feb 11th – Apr 23rd

Mandatory sessions: Feb 11th or 12th; Mar 25th or 26th; Apr 22nd or 23rd [participants must be able to join one 4-hour online session on each of these three weekends]

For further details, see the training pages on the TELL website or contact training@telljp.com