Challenge Three
Community Action
Community Action Volunteering
For Challenge Three of my Commonwealth Award I have decided to volunteer with the Oaklea Trust, a charity who provide care and support across the North of England for vulnerable people. You can visit the companies website here: https://oakleatrust.co.uk.
"Our Mission - To support individuals to achieve their aspirations through care, education & development; encouraging independence and maximising capabilities; to support communities to maximise their impact upon the lives of beneficiaries and value to society."
I began working with for the Charity in January 2022 as part of their Youth Club Leadership Team, supporting children up to the age of 18 with a range of activities in multiple after school and holiday clubs. With being so new to the Charity I decided I wanted to volunteer to discover more about what the charity do and who they support across the North and get involved with projects I wouldn't necessarily do in my current role.
As part of safeguarding and security, as I will be continuing to work with young people, I will not be mentioning school names or towns of where we travelled, as well as blurring out any faces which may appear in photos.
26th February 2022 - 3 Hours
As part of my first session volunteering, I went with my manager Jack to a patch of land that the Oaklea Trust own just outside of my town. The patch of land is being developed into an environmental project for the people Oaklea support to come along, plant trees, bushes and more. Eventually the land will be getting turned into an allotment.
For this session 5 12-15 year olds came along from a local SEND secondary school and I was supporting the kids plant trees. The trees were being planted around the edges of allotment site to provide shelter for the allotment land, along with provide shelter and homes for local wildlife in the future when the fully grow.
About Challenge Three
Challenge Three is to carry out service within the Community. The Challenge should cover a total of at least 20 hours over a minimum of 3 months but within a total of 6 months, along with explaining why you have chosen this particular form of service.
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30th March 2022 - 6 Hours
Today I travelled with Jack slightly further up North to continue the work on the 'Think Green' projects. Jack and I began by travelling to a garden centre to gather new supplies such as soil, tools, gardening gloves, boots and more.
Once we had gathered supplied, we travelled to our first school where we began helping young people who are looking to transform a patch of school property into a new garden. The young people set up a lunchtime club to allow year 7s through to sixth form, the chance to get involved in a communal project with their school and learn about gardening and environmentalism. Below are some photos of the young people getting involved in the project - We began by working as a team to pull weeds out of the ground and get rid of any rubbish, in the future this land will be getting transformed into a brand new space.
After finishing at this school, we travelled about half an hour away to another local school to help with their community project. I was only able to stay for the second school session for an hour before needing to get back home to run my Girlguiding session.
19th April 2022 - 3 Hours
Today I began work on a new project with Jack. This project will be continuing on for many more weeks and will become a regular Tuesday project. This project involves getting my local SEND school involved in developing an allotment. In a couple of weeks, I will be leading this project for 3 weeks as Jack is travelling to Australia.
Today we worked with 3 sixth form students. I began by measuring out the site and creating an AutoCAD (Computer Aided Design) diagram which can be used for further dimensions. These dimensions will help Jack determine how much new fencing, new matting, new wooden panels, new gravel for a path and more that we will need. After measuring, I began helping work with the young people pull up weeds and move any necessary items out of the way to begin the transformation. Below you can see a photo of the site along with a snail I found!
26th April 2022 - 3 Hours
We continued on with the same project, but with another class from the local SEND school, we continued to weed intrusive plants along with digging up some strawberry plants which weren't in the best of health. We got a lot of weeding done and you can really start to see inroads into the project!
3rd May 2022 - 2 Hours
Unfortunately, none of the young people came down to the garden today due to the weather, Jack and I began some extra weeding before talking though what is needed to be done in the coming weeks. On May 9th Jack will be flying out to Australia for 3 weeks. I have began making a plan for what needs to be done. Skips should be coming next week for us to move all household waste out of the site, along with the orders for new fencing and under soil matting.
May 10th, 17th and 24th - 9 hours
Whilst Jack has been away I have looked after several classes whilst in the garden and we have got so much of the garden ready for Jacks return. Unfortunately the skips haven't arrived, but the matting had arrived ready to go down when the weeding is finished.
We found that there has been a lot of deep-rooted weeds and plants which have needed uprooting, so weeding has pretty much taken up the full three weeks. Below are some photos from May 24th. Over the last few weeks both classes at the school have done amazing work and the garden had changed so much.
