By Jack Welch
Volunteer Press Officer
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| Jack shakes hands with Alan Knott, DYA Chairman and Trustee, at exhibition opening. |
Please describe the volunteering you have carried out for this award
For the past year I have been principally involved in a
Heritage Lottery funded project known as the Dorset Young Remembers. This has
largely come as a result from an upcoming 70th anniversary of our main youth
services body, the Dorset Youth Association. This project has looked at the
importance of youth clubs past and present for young people and investigates
the scale which many projects offer different opportunities. For this, I have
been a lead volunteer in securing the funding for the HLF to expand our
project, talking with key press journalists to gather awareness for the project
and maintaining a regular blog online to describe some of the activities young
volunteers participated in. I have also taken a role in interviewing the oral
histories of vital members of the local county who have had a direct impact on
young people (or being a young person themselves and recording their personal
experiences) in the community. After our exhibition opened, I have had a
significant role in organising a celebration at the museum, including Master of
Ceremonies to announce the order of events and acting as a personal tour guide
around one of the sections of the exhibition. As a direct result of the
project, I have volunteered in small roles in the museum to support some of
their facilities as well.
Please tell us about the difference your volunteering has made to other people or the environment
A large proportion of this project was to explain the
purpose and motivations of the project to various figures of the community.
This included journalists from different groups, statutory workers who work
within children's services and our partners from the Museum, which hosted our
exhibition. Overtime, skills in both public speaking and social & hosting
situations were developed and I now feel much more able to approach people who
I am unfamiliar with. Much of this project also consisted in collaborating as a
team and one of the aspects of this was writing for different audience needs.
As a result, peer reading and alterations played a key role in this and I have
been able to adopt this in the respect I can absorb criticism for improvement
later and also be honest with group members when I believe something could be
achieved better.
What skills did you use or develop through your volunteering? Please include examples.
Through the research and knowledge gained from previously
neglected news clippings and annual reports, both myself and members of the
project have met with youth club visitors and people across the community who
have made a difference to young people's lives. With their oral histories and
giving them an opportunity to share their memories that might have otherwise
been unrecorded, they will now be available for the public in the county
archive centre. Also, our project has had a direct link to the future
preservation of youth clubs and I have facilitated in giving the written
evidence on our blog in regards to the effort and achievement young people can
make in their community. DYR allows an opportunity for youth clubs to be
protected in the coming years by council bodies. Thanks to the success of this
project, we have secured seed funding for more young people to take part in an
upcoming new project to follow on from this one.
What have you learned from your volunteering experience?
From this project alone, I have been able to advance both my
communication and negotiating skills with members of the project and others
outside it as well. An example is willingness for my own work to be challenged
and then improved by suggestion about how it may be improved if done
alternatively. As well as this, I have had to pay close attention to the
conversations and responses of people during oral histories and make relevant
statements which support the topic in hand. In addition, I have gained a new
enthusiasm for working with members of the press and ensuring that our project
could secure all the publicity possible. Other aspects include working
independently and research skills, all of which supported the expected traits
for university. If there was perhaps any changes I could have made, it would
have been to have given more time to have investigated ways of getting our
project even more publicity.
