Well.
After surviving the General Election followed by a pretty crappy Bank holiday the weather is just amazing here in London right now as I look out over the glittering Thames just a little way down the road from our Refugee Action Waterloo office.
Volunteers’ Week
Well everybody under the sun has one, a week for something, so why can’t volunteering have one too?
Some people don’t like the word, ‘volunteering’, find it a bit demeaning, or just a bit weird, but until someone else comes up with something that says more obviously – ‘work for free, for something you care about and want to be a part of’, then ‘volunteering’ will just have to do. (Any alternative suggestions welcome, really).
I first volunteered – of my own choosing – when I was sixteen or so with a big national charity, called The Winged Fellowship Trust. I spent a summer in a respite care ‘home’ supporting severely disabled people to give their folks a much needed break to recharge their batteries and carry on the care and support their families relied on. In practice that meant as an averagely uninformed sixteen-year-old, I stayed up most nights watching over a young man 25 or so who needed waking ever 90 minutes to turn his body over so that fluids didn’t enter his lungs and suffocate him.
That’s all I knew about it. But that was enough to keep me on my toes through those long and sometimes boring nights.
But it was fun too
If you can imagine a bunch of fifty sixteen-year-olds, away from home and tasked with serious – arguably some life or death – responsibilities, but living together on a kind of summer holiday camp… interesting stuff happened along the way and bad stuff happened, friendships were charged and forged and broken off and started up again and we were all changed in different ways forever.
Then at college I got involved in my student union in lots of volunteering roles, but this time it changed my life in a very different way. I’d never thought I could organise things or manage things – especially finance – until I got elected Student President, and then I had to, and found that – on a good day – I could be pretty good at organising that kind of stuff. After volunteering with the student union work I had the confidence to go for jobs I’d always thought a bit beyond me, before. And, as a result, I got into charity management of different kinds.
I’ve volunteered, off and on, most my working life since then, the most rewarding being five years as a neighbourhood mediator with Lambeth Mediation Service but I’m taking a break from volunteering at the moment, recharging my own batteries a bit and trying to help our own volunteer programmes develop even stronger.
It’s a bit odd looking in on Refugee Action volunteering and not doing any myself but it gives me a lot of satisfaction seeing how Refuge Action volunteers make all our services work even better.
There’s an old saying we sometimes forget the power of
That the greatest thing any human being can give to another human being – freely – aside from their love – is their labour. And when you put those two ideas together into that time-worn ‘cliché’ a “labour of love” you’re getting closer to what volunteering is really all about. And that’s the extra special energy Refugee Action is powered on.
Whatever we choose to call it, and to be honest – it really doesn’t matter what we call it – we know it when we see it happening, and we’d miss it if it’s gone.
Keep up the amazing work folks, and be a little bit proud of it.
Happy Volunteers’ Week,
Jim
Posted by Jim Glennon