► Student Testimonials

My time with the UoG Students’ Union Volunteering Projects  

by Dani Eathorne.

I absolutely loved being involved in the volunteering opportunities provided by UoG SU. The atmosphere is always friendly and as you are all there for a common cause, you are with like minded people who are also there to have fun.

I worked with six to twelve year olds of St.Paul’s in Activity Time and Splash; they were fantastic. You can’t help but come away smiling every time, whether the children are challenging or not. You are provided with a way of developing your skills working with children and for aspiring leaders there are also many opportunities to run your own session and put your own ideas into practice. It was rewarding to see a child learn a new skill or succeed where they had not been able to before.

The other projects also offer interesting opportunities of their own. For example, the SU Tea Dance introduces you to a completely new style of dancing! The more mature members of the community that attend are always delighted to be able to share something of their past with the students and the Christmas gathering is a great place to do it – the cakes aren’t bad either :-D

Being a Superstar was another valued experience. This project gives you the chance to help the new students moving into halls and see their arrival (hopefully) go as smoothly as yours. You can make new friends, comfort those who are finding their feet and reassure the parents that their son/daughter will be fine and yes, they can go now.

All in all I owe much to my time spent with Amy Hoddy and the SU volunteering projects that she runs. The experiences are invaluable and look brilliant on the CV and all the while it certainly doesn’t feel like unpaid labour but rather just having a laugh with another group of friends. It is a lovely way of being introduced to the world of work and if you love working with people, you will love this. It’s flexible and because it is run by the Students’ Union they understand the demands of the workload. I would wholeheartedly recommend volunteering in these projects to anyone.

The Tea Dance this year is to be held on Wednesday 30th November. Anyone interested in joining in the fun at such an event is invited to contact Amy on ahoddy@glos.ac.uk

I had never worked with this client group before and was initially nervous as I didn’t really know what to expect but I soon found that my expectations and thoughts on learning disabilities to be totally changed by my volunteering experience. I found out that the point of the Diamond Club was simply to have fun!! Any preconceived ideas I may have had were soon swept away as we went bowling, did arts and craft, played pool and football, made cupcakes and finally rounded off the year with a Christmas party. This really was the highlight of my volunteering experience with the Diamond Club as we played pass the parcel, musical chairs and culminated in a mini-disco in which I found myself roped into dancing along with various clients and throwing all my inhibitions away!! 

In the New Year I chose the Volunteering and Employability module as one of my extra choices as, again, I thought it would be good for my CV and perhaps I could learn some new transferable skills; always good when looking for a job! The module required students to do a 25 hour voluntary placement at a place of our choice. Now even though I had left the Diamond Club due to other commitments and increasing workload, I desperately missed seeing the clients. Around this time I developed a real sense of what I wanted to do, along side studying Sociology, I realised I wanted to work somewhere in the Care and Support Sector with vulnerable people. It struck me that I could continue seeing the Diamond Club clients if I could volunteer at Berkeley Court Day Centre as well as gain invaluable experience in working with a particularly vulnerable social group.

Through one of the support workers who attended the Diamond Club I was able to make contact with Berkeley Court and arrange a meeting with the manager. At the same time I had a part time job as a relief support worker with a Supported Housing Association and used the experiences and skills gained from this to put myself forward to the manager as an ideal volunteer for her Day Centre. Thankfully the interview went well and I soon found myself signed up to doing one day a week for five weeks.

I didn’t realise what I had let myself in for to be perfectly honest! Whereas with the Diamond Club I had socialised with maybe six clients at most, Berkeley Court has up to sixty clients accessing its services on any given day. It was a real baptism of fire for me but I soon overcame my initial concerns and again found myself challenging my own preconceptions. The more time I spent with the clients, the more they wanted to talk and engage with me. Perhaps the biggest challenge I found was with learning to engage with the various clients who found talking difficult and instead used non-verbal methods to communicate. It’s surprising how quickly you can pick up basic sign language if you use it enough and as my confidence grew I began to use it more and more which the clients really appreciated. A few of them even taught me some rude signs which I often found directed at me from across the room!! I enjoyed volunteering at Berkeley Court so much that I continued doing it for another 6 months after the module had finished and only reluctantly stopped in my third year as my dissertation loomed.

Volunteering, at first with the Diamond Club, and later at Berkeley Court, was probably one of my best life experiences so far and I was able to take far more from it than the time I put in. I am currently still working in Supported Housing for a company called Stonham which works with a large and varied client base; people faced with a variety of social problems including homelessness, substance misuse, offending behaviour and mental health issues. I am a mobile project worker for a project that works with and houses single adult men aged 25 and over and who all have had or continue to have problems with some of the issues outlined above. I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have been able to get my job if it wasn’t for the time I spent volunteering and all the experience and skills I picked up a long the way. Even though the client group I work with is different to those I volunteered with, the skills I learnt and use are the same and I’ve managed to find a job that I love and an opportunity to help people for a living, a large part of which I owe to my volunteering experience.

Volunteering is a great way to give up some of your time and get a whole lot more back out of it, and the Students’ Union runs a variety of groups so there will always be something for everyone. Let’s face it, students have a lot of free time on their hands, especially in the first year and what better way to fill it than give up a few hours a week doing something that helps others. Along the way you’ll gain friends, skills, fantastic experiences and you may even find your vocation in life!!