As my first year working at Youth Concern comes to an end, I wanted to take some time to reflect on how the year has gone. At the start of the year, I was so excited to create Youth Concern’s volunteer programme, but it also felt like a mammoth task and one I wanted to do justice to. So I focused the first six months on learning about the charity, trying to understand how volunteers could become a part of the team and structured the volunteer programme accordingly.

Launching the programme in September was in equal parts exciting and terrifying. My biggest worry was that we would have no interest. In fact the opposite was true and I was inundated with enquiries. The months that followed were a whirlwind of recruiting and onboarding new volunteers.

Now, nearly a year on we have a group of fantastic new volunteers, across several different roles and I continue to onboard new volunteers every week. It’s amazing seeing the positive impact our volunteers are having already. I am so excited to see what the volunteers and I can achieve in the forthcoming year!