Empowering young volunteers: How volunteering helped me and how it can help others.
Through volunteering, I have seen how my experiences have helped me as well as my community around me. Before I started, I had been told what the most relevant benefits were: developing skills, filling my CV and supporting my community. I came to find that these only scratched the surface of what I have and continue to gain and learn from it.
As a young volunteer, I started in my first position with no experience or skills but that quickly changed. Prompted by my school as part of building experience for my CV, I volunteered with the younger groups at my gymnastics class. I began as a kind of ‘teachers assistant’ but soon gained physical skills in spotting as well as other soft skills like communication and adaptability that naturally come with working with children. Soon after, I was ‘promoted’ to co-leading the youngest group and with it came new experiences when supporting the students during competitions and choreographing routines which I never would have encountered had I not asked to volunteer in the first place. This instilled a sense of responsibility, and also showed me, for the first time, how empowering it can feel to contribute to a shared goal.
It was also the first in a long list of benefits I have felt with my personal growth. For example, I have become more confident – proactively engaging with people to gain more experience and build connections that will help me further. This is a trait that has landed me internship experience as well as where I am now at Southampton Voluntary Services.
I have also been through a wide range of different working environments such as schools, extra-curricular clubs and retail and with it, I have had exposure to many fields of study that I wasn’t aware of before. Wildlife and environmental volunteering are what transformed my passion into considering it academically, leading me to study biology which I may never have done without it.
As mentioned, volunteering empowers young people by providing them with skills and experience that can improve their chances of success in pursuing careers. I learnt this firsthand when applying for university and then internship opportunities. My range of volunteering had given me a mixture of soft skills that meant I was more personable in interviews and had problem-solving and teamworking skills that appealed to the interviewer. Throughout my school years I had been balancing volunteering responsibilities with varying levels of academic intensity, through which I improved my time management and organisational skills.
Maybe one of the most obvious benefits of volunteering, is the community aspect of it. I have been introduced to so many different people and avenues of thinking and have formed many friendships that I still have today. Many of those connections have led me on to new opportunities too that have furthered my feelings of belonging and purpose in my local community. The feeling of having helped others in their lives never really goes away and it has been a strong motivator in how I have personally advocated for social justice and change in my life.
As you can see, volunteering has empowered me in many aspects of my life; guiding career and academic decisions, building friendships and networks that I still have and taught me more about the community than I could have learnt in a classroom. I hope that the impact I have had has been just as immeasurable, through the people I have helped. It is for these reasons, and I hope to inspire other young volunteers to take up a role as well.
Written by Tanvi Singhal