Whether it's stewarding at a festival, writing for a magazine, or producing works of art, volunteering for creative projects is bound to get those juices flowing.

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Monday Aug 30, 2010

Summer's nearly over - so the fun can start again

It's been a long while since I've been at Wilton, but even though the club has been closed for summer, we've still been working behind the scenes. And apart from some big changes in my voluntary life, I've also gone through some big changes in my personal life. Strangely, they connect rather well...

So to start with, the big news about Wilton. We got the funding! It's not as much as we applied for, but it's still a hefty sum considering the tight budget we were running on before. As with local authorities across the country, Hackney Council is currently experiencing funding cuts that will affect all their voluntary sector projects. Fortunately, the council have been really supportive and instead of saying "no" to us, they helped us reach a compromise.

Together with advice from Hackney Council, we managed to re-write the application and re-balance what we were asking for. This means that we can still run the music and media projects we were planning, just over a slightly longer time-scale and with less equipment. In a couple of weeks I'll be going back to Wilton to start the media project with Helen. I hope loads of the kids will join in since school will have started again and they'll need something to do indoors when the weather gets worse.

Helen has organised for Headliners to come in and do a taster session so we can establish what sort of journalism the kids will want to do: print, video, photography or radio. I've been to a Headliners taster session before so I know it's a fantastic organisation. They train young people in media skills and then, for some projects, actually get the stories featured in the national media. As all people in the youth sector know, it's notoriously difficult to get young people's views heard in the mainstream, so their role is really admirable. I'm sure the kids will get stuck in straight away and I'm really glad they're on board.

In my last blog, I also mentioned that I was writing for the Hackney Council Voluntary Services magazine, Spark, as a volunteer. I did this because I wanted to find out more about the voluntary sector and also to get some more journalistic experience. I went part-time from my job as a press officer for a youth charity in July so that I could start freelancing as a journalist. I wrote an article for them about their new strategy for the voluntary and community sector. It was interesting to learn how the private, voluntary and third sectors all interact in a borough and what changes are coming as the Government sets its new policies. You can read the article on the Spark Summer 2010 issue on pages 8-9.

And the big news about me? Well, I've got a new full-time job. In a couple of weeks I'll be starting work as a journalist for Children & Young People Now magazine and I'll be covering youth work. I'm so lucky that I'm going to be able to combine so many of my passions: youth issues, politics, writing and youth work. It sad to be leaving YouthNet, which is obviously the home of Do-it, but since I'm staying in the sector I'll still be in touch with all my old colleagues and I'll still be blogging about Wilton. I'm just another of the many bloggers here that demonstrate how volunteering can aid your career, and that's something I want to continue to promote.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with news of how the first day back has gone. In the meantime, I've got to sort out my CRB certificate and see if I can still remember all the kids' names...wish me luck! 

Posted by GabyJ ( 2:19 PM )
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