Recent Updates

After promising not to neglect you, I've not updated this blog in a while... I've been busy blogging for Do-it however! You can read my posts about recent community events in Newsome including our  Potato Day and the Growing Communities workshops, where we looked at why food growing works in Newsome and how and why such projects began. I also wrote about Oxfam after I went to speak to a group of teenagers in Barnsley about the work they do.

Getting a Buzz from Training

This post also appears on my Do-it.org blogspot:

Working as a volunteer is a good way of getting on the job experience, but if you're lucky enough then you might get to do some training and qualifications as well. Through volunteering I've gained First Aid and Brushcutter qualifications and learnt about many interesting things from Forest Gardening to how to make yurt wheel. This week I went on a course about Bee Keeping specifically designed for community volunteers. The course was at Trafford Hall, which is the home of the National Communities Resource Centre. Having won some funding from the Tudor Trust, they are offering bargain courses for community volunteers, which include food and accommodation, and have a linked small grants scheme where volunteers can apply for up to £500 towards their project. The whole programme seems like an excellent way to give volunteers more skills and greater ownership over the projects they are involved in. It was also a great way to get well fed for a couple of days! I've got another course in March and I can't wait to have another volunteer's "mini-break"!

The course itself was very interesting and informative, and extremely thorough! We had two days of learning the theory behind bee keeping, from the biology to the practicalities, and in May we will return to have a practical session, although I'm hoping that I'll have a chance to put some of the things I've learned into practice before then. We are due to have some hives on Stirley Farm, and following the course I feel much better equipped to get involved and hopefully if we get the grant we will literally be much better equipped too! Doing the course actually made me feel very nostalgic about university. I studied biology and on my year abroad I did a research project on ants, which have a very similar social structure to bees. It felt great to get back to the classroom! I'd love to do a Masters degree but I know that it would be mostly for my own enjoyment, and that volunteering is the best thing that I can do for my career at the moment. Whilst my training allowance won't get me through a MSc, I'm very happy to be learning about bees and meeting lots of other people working on community projects!

Hungry for More?

If you're reading this, then you've somehow found yourself on my volunteering blog... If you like it and you'd like to read more of the same, I have now started blogging for Do-it.org, the volunteering organisation. My posts will be in the Environment and Heritage section. Don't worry, I'll still be posting here - possibly even more frequently than before!

You don't have to be crazy to volunteer here...

Somehow, without trying  or even asking, I seem to have got myself an amazing work experience opportunity, so this week my blog comes direct from Westminster. After visiting my MP some time ago, I was invited by him to work with him for a week in his london office. If I had to choose one word to describe my first day, it would be: surreal. 

It was surreal first of all, just to be doing it! I got a bit of a kick out of being (relatively) smartly dressed and walking around London thinking "look at me, all smart, walking around London like I know where I'm going, like I've got a job or something..." My boyfriend text me saying "how does it feel to be living the dream?" as I was coming up from the underground at Westminster. Pretty strange, I thought, as it's someone else's dream I'm living! 

I was hit by a second wave of surreality during my tour of parliament.Soon after arriving, I was rushed down to Westminster Hall to get a place on the tour to find out some more of the history and just how things happen in my temporary place of work. As I was being shown around the different rooms, told about the various ceremonies, taking in all the pomp and rituality, a thought hit me. "This is how the most important decisions, things that effect all of our every day lives, are made." It seems to work, so leave them to it I guess.

The rest of the day continued in the same vein. There was a moment where I was literally RUNNING through the corridors of parliament. I felt like I was in a film. A comedy, I think. The conclusion I came to is that it's the kind of workplace that could stand to have one of those sign's that reads "you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps".  

2011 - Year of the Volunteer

The UN designated 2011 “International Year of the Volunteer”, and so did I, although I didn't realise it at the time. I had dabbled in volunteer work days and helping out at events, but as of January 2011, I became a full-time volunteer.

My volunteering journey started when I was offered a placement on the Sharpham Estate in Devon. Along with three other volunteers, I lived on a low impact yurt camp on the estate and worked on conservation and environmental tasks as well as community outreach and education. I learnt a lot in the 15 weeks I spent as a volunteer at Sharpham, perhaps most importantly, what my main interests and motivating factors are. I think for a lot of people, the main barrier they face is knowing what it actually is they want to do when it comes down to the specifics, especially in a sector like conservation. The best way to find out is just to get out there and do it! Volunteering such a good way of exploring this due to the amount of variety these positions normally enjoy. On my placement at Sharpham, as well as general conservation tasks which for us included battling against lots of invasive species such as rhododendron, laurel, willow herb and bull rushes we also helped out in the walled vegetable garden and going to see other projects as part of our outreach, which was perhaps my favourite thing about the placement. We went to help out at a wide range of projects including a recently created wetland area, a “glamping”site in a small private woodland and the very early stages of a community growing project where a small group of people had teamed up to buy a field which would then be used to produce food for the local area. For getting a first hand experience in such a wide range of projects, I realised that community projects about food and farming were what interested me the most. Having realised this, imagine how excited I was when I saw an advert for a traineeship with the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust on a community farm project near Huddersfield! I got the placement, thanks to the skills and experience I'd gained through previous voluntary roles, and started at Stirley Community Farm in July. In six months working on the farm, I've learned and achieved a lot and got a new confidence that I didn't have before I started my volunteering odyssey. One of the best things about being involved in the Stirley farm project is that it is powered by volunteers, meaning that I get to work with a lot of like-minded, interesting people who understand what I'm doing, because they're doing it to!

I should give you one warning about volunteering – it is highly addictive! As well as being a full-time volunteer for the YWT, I also volunteer for Oxfam, the Eco-Schools programme, and regularly journey to Manchester to help out with events at the Manchester Museum. When people ask me why I do what I do, one of the easiest things for them to grasp is that it is to get a good CV and help me get a job but that's really just a small part of it. Of course that's one of the very welcome side-effects, but the main reason is because of the enjoyment I get out of it. You couldn't be a volunteer if you didn't enjoy it! I remember a discussion I had at an Oxfam training weekend, where one girl I was talking to was quite shocked when I said that volunteering is never a completely selfless act. The volunteer always gets something good out of it too, even if we're just talking about a warm fuzzy feeling, otherwise no-one would do it!

A quick bit of research tells me that 2012 is the UN International Year of Cooperatives but for me it continues to be the year of volunteering... For the next six months at least!

It's official – I'm no longer a young person

In December I turned 26, and as far as I can tell, this is the point at which I stop being a young person. Firstly, I bid a fond farewell to my Young Person's Railcard (only 34 years to wait until I am eligible for my Senior Card...). Secondly, this is the cut off point for most “youth” volunteering projects and one year ago at the ripe old age of 25, this was my motivating factor to quit my 9 to 5 job and get involved in some of the exciting youth projects happening in the UK. I was lucky enough to get involved in an exciting project in Devon funded by V inspired, the youth volunteering organisation which funded projects for 16-25 year olds, just before the project finished. Before turning 26, I also managed to get an application in for O2's Think Big project, funding community projects for people aged 13 – 25. I feel that I've made the most of the last year of my youth, but it doesn't stop now that I'm just a person (not a young person). Volunteering is for everyone and I'm sure I'll find lots of exciting projects for old people, like me...

Front Page News!

My photograph on the front page of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust website (there's a credit on their which is just about visible...)