A vSpecial Moment

Copied From: http://dorsetyoungremembers.blogspot.co.uk/

By Jack Welch

Volunteer Press Officer

Jack shakes hands with Alan Knott, DYA Chairman
and Trustee, at exhibition opening.

Jack Welch, a fellow volunteer of the Dorset Young Remembers, has recently been awarded a new position in the vInspired offices. Until August 2013, he will serve as a new member of the Youth Advisory Board (YAB) which helps create and make important decisions in all aspects which affect young people volunteering in their communities in the present day. It is a very exciting prospect as he will now be able to support the new and upcoming projects (including our new successor to the Dorset Young Remembers, to be revealed soon!) and others across the county. As well as this, he has completed an application for the v100 certificate, in which volunteers who give over 100 hours of their time can apply for the award, and has agreed to share his response to the ways in which he has benefited from working over a year in the exciting project: 

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.