At Shaw Trust one of our staff benefits is two paid volunteering days each year. Braden our Graphic Designer, shares his experience of volunteering.
Just down the road from me is a shop called Interestingly Different. They sell all sorts of cool pieces of vintage, reclaimed, and upcycled furniture. I’ve walked past for years admiring the furniture in the window but little did I know this shop was so much more than it first seemed. The shop is a social enterprise run by a not-for-profit called Nickel Support. Set up nine years ago by former learning disability charity co-workers Nick and Elena after seeing a gap in the services on offer.
Their aim is to change the face of learning disability support. Through their enterprises, Nickel Support provide a holistic and engaging service that gives adults with learning disabilities and/or autism a place to go to improve their confidence, skills, physical and mental health, and ultimately their employability. They provide direct work experience and the profits from their enterprises go towards paying their trainees a wage. The support the roughly 70 trainees receive is also supplemented with sessions like dance and yoga which the trainees seem to really benefit from. Their other enterprises include the development of different products from jams and chutneys to bath bombs, which will eventually be sold in local businesses, giving the trainees experience of lots of different aspects of work and business. Finally, as a community focused project, they put on a pop-up café for parents and carers and of course anyone else who wants to pop in for a coffee. In short, they do a lot!
After reaching out via email and an initial chat with the guys, it was clear that we absolutely share the same values, and given that I am something of a wannabe furniture craftsman, I don’t think I could have found a better place to choose to spend my volunteering days.
For my first day, I spent the morning in their up-cycling workshop. We had eight trainees with us, all working together to re-finish some pieces of furniture that had either been sourced, commissioned, or donated. In this workshop, the trainees sand and paint the different items of furniture to get them ready to be sold in the Interestingly Different shop. It was very lively, all the trainees had a lot of energy and enthusiasm for what they were doing. It was a great environment to be in, especially after 18 months of working from home! Though I did spend quite a good amount of time attempting to get some very rusty screws out of a sideboard to remove all the hardware. It was fantastic to see first-hand the impact this service has on their trainees and I was made to feel part of their ‘Nickel family’ from the very start.
I had been looking to be more involved with my local community for some time now and I’m really pleased I was able to find such a great organisation to work with. If you have a similar ambition, I highly recommend using your volunteering days, it’s a great benefit you have available and for me, it was highly rewarding. The process is really easy, once you have identified who you would like to support and agreed it with your manager it’s a simple matter of logging your days on business world as you would any other absence or leave. I was a little nervous about reaching out to my chosen organisation out of the blue, but they were really receptive and welcoming.