Angela is a psychology student – she volunteers twice a week for the mental health team at Voluntary Action Camden (VAC).
What do you do as a volunteer?
I go to Voluntary Action Camden every Monday and Tuesday afternoon, helping the mental health team (3-4 people) to organise events and administer the paperwork. The mental health team holds a number of training programmes each month to inform people and staff of the importance of mental health issues and how to work confidently with clients. Thus, I help them contact people who might be interested in the session and collect their evaluations afterwards for further summary and future improvement. I am also responsible for writing the monthly E-bulletin which lists all the upcoming events.
What were your first impressions when you started volunteering?
I was very surprised but also very glad that I was selected as a volunteer as the selection was very competitive this year. Therefore. The job was not easy at the beginning, as all the old files had to be reorganised for the current year. In addition, I was a little nervous about getting touch with people.
How do you feel about it now?
I find the job less difficult now and quite enjoy it. The team helped me learn from my mistake and improved my confidence about communicative as well as administrative skills. I am very happy that they value my work, trust me and will let me continue volunteering next academic year.
What’s the best thing about volunteering?
The best thing about volunteering is meeting new people and putting the knowledge learnt at university into real use. Sometimes I became very excited when I saw things learnt at university mentioned during the training. In addition, I am very happy to see that more and more people become familiarised with mental health issues through our training, so that they would be able to cope with relevant problems and help others in relevant situations.
And what’s the most challenging thing?
Creativity is the most challenging thing. It is hard to make some activities original and more fun so that people can learn and remember better. In addition, it is difficult to persuade more people to participate in the training. This is something I still need to work on. What is also challenging is my personal time management. As I volunteer twice a week, I found myself busy attending lectures as well as doing volunteer work. Therefore, I need to learn how to achieve things more efficiently.
How has volunteering changed you?
I believe I have been more considerate about details and have become more sophisticated in management and administration. I am more confident about interacting with other people in discussion and value the importance of the diversity of ideas. I also found myself more interested in psychology and put more emphasis on the significance of raising people’s awareness of mental health issues.
What difference do you feel you’ve made by volunteering?
I feel I provide the team with some fresh ideas about training organisation, so that people at different ages would all find it interesting and engaging. Since the team holds training quite frequently each month, they have little time to do post-evaluation before the next training; as a volunteer, I could help them finish the work more efficiently. I also helped with fundraising, raising money for future activities.
Would you recommend the project to anyone else? If so, why?
I would thoroughly recommend this volunteer work, especially to psychology students. Not only you can learn many communicative skills, you would also find the content of trainings quite interesting and useful in terms of linking with what you might learn during lectures. However, I would like to stress that you don’t have to be a psychology student to take part in the team, as they would like to get students from other courses to take part. You can help them in other aspects such as communication and finance. The people in the mental health team and at VAC are all very nice and friendly; they are very happy to provide you with as many opportunities as possible to help you learn during volunteering.