My volunteering experience

Kaiden shares his experiences of volunteering and why more people should volunteer.

I’ve been volunteering with a local Charity; Sovereign House GH for a few months now and I’ve enjoyed my time so far, volunteering has always been something I’ve been interested in doing but never had the time to do so.

Because of the lockdown, I knew I had to do something with my free time and for my community. Like many, I choose to look at the charity sector for an opportunity to help out in any way I can.

That’s when I came across a role being advertised on the Salford Advantage website (a job portal for University of Salford Students and Graduates). The role being advertised was for a web and social media assistant which had a wide range of duties and opportunities to learn. I did my research on Sovereign House GH and liked what they were doing both In Salford and Ghana, especially their emphasis on helping the disadvantaged.

My main role at Sovereign House GH as a web and social media assistant gives me the chance to do a lot for the charity from research for social media posts, creating social media posts, learning to edit the web pages, file migration, and scheduling posts for publishing. Volunteering has given me new skills and experiences which will help me in my future career.

Volunteering for a small charity has boosted my confidence and gave me a purpose that I lacked when I was unemployed. I’m always working on something when I’m in the office and my work usually varies from day to day. This makes the role interesting and enjoyable which helps me be more productive in my role.

Volunteering at Sovereign House GH has increased my awareness of poverty in Salford and the importance of education for children which will help to raise them out of poverty. Although my role doesn’t have much to do with our lessons currently, it does have a lot to do with increasing the awareness of the need for these lessons.

Volunteering is very uplifting as I know all the hard work I do is for a good cause and is helping someone. Volunteering lets me see more about the challenges and problems, not just what my community is facing in Salford but also what’s happening on the other side of the world.

Volunteering is something I would encourage more people to do especially in these unprecedented times as more and more charities need help with a variety of roles. Whatever type of cause you are interested in helping, will have a charity looking for volunteers. Charities are usually flexible when it comes to working hours which can be adjusted to suit your life and schedule. Even a few hours a week can have a massive impact on the charity making a great difference to their cause.

As part of my time as a Volunteer at Sovereign House GH, I’ve been offered an opportunity to learn additional skills by taking online courses, these courses will not only help me in my role but also in my future career. The current course I’m doing is re-teaching me how to code in different programming languages: e.g HTML, JavaScript. This course is not just beneficial for me but also for the charity as with my new skills, it’ll help me with my work on the website revamp but also eventually allow me to create lesson plans for our students.

Find out how you can make a difference, click the link: Volunteering