Introduction
I started out on a volunteering path with the objective of giving myself a daily purpose. I certainly didn’t consider any aspirations of returning to my former professional self. I recall how I wasn’t being guarded or risk averse by not setting work related goals, I simply felt like a very different person than the guy who’d had a successful professional career.
As it turned out, my path through various volunteering positions was an approach which I don’t think could have been bettered if I was consciously deriving a way back into professional employment. In the context of my recovery, volunteering turned out to be analogous to the term ‘vocational rehabilitation’.
Dog Walking
Dates: June to July 2016
I discovered that the personal attachment of some owners to their pets could make for challenging social interaction. In one circumstance, a dog owner insisted that even after two trial runs, he’d come along with me when I planned to take his dog out. Things came to a head when I suggested I take his dog out with my then eleven-year-old daughter, and he insisted on accompanying us. After this episode, I put an end to my volunteer dog walking activity.
Air Ambulance Charity Shop
Dates: August to October 2016
I was offered a role in the Midlands Air Ambulance charity’s Newcastle-under-Lyme charity shop, after I’d entered the store to ask if there was any way in which I could help out. I worked in a basement storeroom, organising the bags of goods which had been donated. For instance, I may have been tasked with sorting clothes into same-sized piles or putting them onto hangars in readiness for being placed on rails in the shop.
I recorded a video (below) as my tribute to their mission: saving time, saving lives.
I’d thought the Midlands Air Ambulance were part of my lifesaver team. However, I learned it was actually North West Air Ambulance who transported me from the scene of my road traffic collision in Nantwich.
Royal Voluntary Service (RVS)
Dates: September 2016 to July 2017
I undertook a befriending role, principally with two people: Gloria and Trevor. The premise was simply to sit and chat with an elderly person who didn’t have any friends or family available.
I developed a lovely friendship with Gloria, who I patiently taught to use her first mobile phone, then set up a new landline phone I helped her to choose. I wrote some basic instructions for her to use when I wasn’t around. I didn’t do much else other than sit and chat, while eating her biscuits and drinking mugs of tea 😀
Trevor was an awkward person who I failed to like, nevertheless I persevered in visiting him in the hope that he’d get some value from our social interaction. Trevor was a person who was right about everything, even when plainly wrong. Unfortunately, there came a point when he was too unpleasant with his attitude towards some of the people in his life that I had to withdraw from befriending.
A third person I briefly helped, was a ninety-year-old man who lived in Trentham. I’d take him by car to the Haywood Hospital every week to visit his sixty-five-year-old son who’d had a stroke. I visited the Broadfield ward, where I’d been a patient for six weeks – some of the staff remembered me. In my fog of confusion at the time, I’d apparently told them that I’d been injured in a roller coaster crash on the Smiler (roller coaster ride) at the Alton Towers, Staffordshire theme park.
The RVS asked me to take part in an interview with the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel regarding my work with them, which I’ve converted into a PDF.
Library IT Buddy
Dates: November 2016 to July 2017
I progressed from my befriending role with the RVS, to utilising my IT skills in helping the elderly or unskilled on the shared computers at my local library. I’d typically create email accounts for folk, or help them to access their energy utility accounts online, etc. I started off doing one four-hour shift in my first week, but after a month I enjoyed it so much that I’d do two six-hour shifts each week. The library staff would sometimes have to insist that I went for breaks to get my lunch. I’ve uploaded the completed application form where I explained the rationale for me wanting to volunteer, and the skills I envisaged I’d be contributing.
I dealt with people who had physical disabilities, dementia, and one guy with terminal cancer. It soon became apparent that IT was only about twenty per cent of what the IT buddy role entailed; it was empathy which people seemed to need, and my RVS volunteering had vastly helped me to develop patience and understanding. After several months as an IT buddy, a number of my repeat customers asked me if I’d be willing to help them out on a one-to-one basis, either by me going to their home, or vice versa.
Upon leaving my IT buddy role to return to professional employment, I wrote the piece displayed in the following snippet for the library to put in a case study they were producing.
It can be seen in the following inset photo that I enjoyed my time as an IT buddy, the picture was taken by a gentleman I’d helped out with his email. He started a conversation about Rubik’s cubes and was fascinated by my claim to be able to do it in five minutes or so; he thereupon challenged me. So, I brought in the cube I had at home for our next appointment the following week. He’d been toying with a Rubik’s cube for years (using YouTube videos and help guides) and had never been able to successfully complete one, so he watched intensely as I completed it in four minutes. He took my hand, raised it aloft, and walked me around the busy library while proclaiming “Everybody look at this man, he’s a genius.” I felt like a complete birk 😀
While at the library, I was under the supervision of a staff member who I would describe as a little unorthodox. He has his own YouTube channel and goes by the pseudonym Colin Surname.
I miss being an IT buddy. It’s not for the work per se, but for meeting lots of new people and feeling like I made a positive difference to their lives, no matter how small.