Activity
Investing in Volunteers: Lara’s Experience at Salmon
24/04/2017
Volunteers are essential to help make the work that the Salmon Youth Centre provide for young people successful. Due to this, Salmon is investing in our volunteers through providing the opportunity for them to learn new skills that they can take away with them and gain support needed to broaden their awareness of what it means to be a youth worker.
Lara Paquete Pereira is currently volunteering at Salmon as part of her student placement from Goldsmith University and we caught up with her to find out how her time at Salmon has been so far…
My time volunteering at Salmon has been very challenging and fun at the same time, I am learning and gaining experience that I need to have in order to finish my Community Development and Youth Work course at university, so it has been very positive.
Prior to starting, I had all this theory about understanding the young people and changing the way society sees them, and after the first few days, I thought about focusing more on Community Development but that is not how I feel anymore, I definitely want to be a youth worker and I think at Salmon and all the experience I have gained so far influenced me to carry on.
During my time here, my skills in youth work have definitely improved, when it comes to the older groups, the approach I used to have was more in a parenting way, but as a trainee youth worker and seeing the youth workers in action, I have learned to be more lenient with the young people, its been an eye opener and I am quite happy with my progress.
When my placement finishes, what I will take away from Salmon are the experience dealing with young people as well as the teamwork. The salmon staff are a very good team and once I finish my degree I would like to be part of a team like that, where everyone seems to gets along and are willing to help each other and I think that is brilliant that Salmon has such a strong team.
To sum up my time so far here, it has been an eye opening experience with loads of positive points.
If you are interested in volunteering at Salmon, please contact Matt Perkins.