Today we are celebrating International Day of Charity by talking about how you can become a volunteer. The day highlights kindness, encourages generosity and promotes acts that make a difference. Becoming a volunteer can help with your wellbeing, creating confidence, community and can help you feel good about yourself. It can create a sense of purpose, boost self-esteem and increase your social interaction as well as giving back to your community.
Becoming a volunteer; It can take a lot of confidence to give your time up as a volunteer but being a volunteer doesn’t have to be doing it for charity. It can be going litter picking within your community or tutoring and so on. It can be anything where you are giving up your time to help others and your community.
How to become a volunteer?
Getting in contact with volunteering opportunities is where you are able to enquire about getting involved. Most opportunities have contact details you can use or there are some places such as charities, you can also go in person to talk about it.
Getting involved with Platfform4YP; We have plenty of opportunities for you to get involved. You can sign up to activities that you are interested in or you can volunteer with us by contacting 4yp@platfform.org You will be able to have the opportunity to create content for our website. You can create blogs, send over feedback and ideas that you would like to see on our website and social media and website etc.
Our stories; Why I love being a Peer Mentor!
How I became a peer mentor?
I first completed the State of Mind 10-week wellbeing course in the summer of 2019 and I was able to keep in contact with the lovely people from my group since the course. I was offered a chance to complete a level 2 accredited Peer Mentor training with a group of people like me.
Don’t doubt yourself!
At first, I was really excited and jumped on the opportunity to do it, but then I began to worry. I really wanted to help others and give them the same opportunity as I had, but thoughts such as ‘What if I’m not good enough?’ or ‘What if I get overwhelmed?’ started to pop into my head. The lovely people running the training reassured me that I didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t feel comfortable with and that my wellbeing came first.
Be Excited!
I’m so glad that I decided to do the training. Since we were in lockdown, our group completed the course on Zoom over 2 weeks and I can honestly say that I looked forward to our sessions every day. Although I was learning valuable mentoring skills, it was so casual and just fun to speak to people with the same objective as you.
Here are just a few things that I personally benefitted from the peer mentor training:
- Met kind and caring people who understand me
- Improved my confidence and communication skills
- Increased my ability to empathise
- Given me hope
- Felt supported
- An accredited course that I can add to my CV
- Given me new and exciting opportunities to help others
Becoming a volunteer, no matter what you decide to do, can have many benefits for your own wellbeing. Not only because you are helping others and making a difference, volunteering can help boost your confidence, give you a sense of purpose, strengthen connections with others and so much more.