Nikki's Volunteer Story

OK, so I'm here. Just doing a quick interview with Nicky, who's a volunteer. Outreach. Um, So, Nikki, can you tell me more about your volunteer experience? Outreach? Yeah

Um, volunteering with outreach has given me so much confidence. Um, got me interacting with, um, the general public again. Um, services was coming into the cafe, and I was able to interact with them very well

Due to well, I've had past experience of working with people with certain certain needs. Um, so OK, fantastic. And, um, what kind of challenges or successes did you experience as a volunteer? I was out of work for six years

Um, so coming to outreach, it's given me the confidence to get back out into a working environment. Um, speak, um, working with the staff from outreach as well plus service users. It gave me that sense of, um, a sense of purpose to getting up in the morning, Um, and gave me the confidence to get back out to work

Brilliant. Um, and can you tell me more about your journey from volunteer to becoming a paid staff member? So I set with outreach in September last year, and by January, this year I was asked to apply for a senior support work role. I've currently got, um, a degree in health and social care, which is BS C honours

And, um, it was recognised by staff here that, um I I had the qualities to work as a senior support worker. Brilliant. Um, and why did you volunteer? It was generally to get me out of the house, and I was stuck in a rut

It was, um get me out. Talking to people again and just building my own self esteem back up as well. Brilliant

And finally, what have you got out of volunteering? And the best thing is, is working with the service users and getting to know all the staff here and building good relationships up with them and, um, just feeling rewarded at the end of the day. Brilliant. Thank you very much

Nikki. Ok,.