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Hi my name is Melissa, I’m from South Australia. I’m a young person, I am involved with
lots of volunteering but I also support young people to volunteer.
I grew up in a rural community and there weren’t many services for us young people, and
young people wanted to see things happening and no one was doing anything about it.
So I thought, well why can’t we as young people do it? So I started volunteering in
my local community and started planning events
and started volunteering that way. So that was my first initial thing, and that was about
15 years ago now. And through that I eventually got involved in more and more things.
As I went along I really loved it, I started learning lots of great stuff.
I think today, that’s what helped me get into my work, as a Youth Participation Officer.
It’s really important for me to volunteer in the
rural area still, I travel back to the country lots
of times to do lots of stuff as well as in the city I work in supporting young people
to run their own events, and do fundraising campaigns,
promotions.
Just working with young people, even when I was a young person… it’s just so much
fun, I get so much out of the people I meet and
it has opened up a wide world of opportunities. Currently at the moment I am
a young social pioneer in a program with the Foundation for Young Australians, its 14 of
us around South Australia, all young people who are social pioneers within their own communities
that are doing great stuff.
And if I wasn’t volunteering in my community and being involved, I would have never got
opportunities in great programs, getting to meet great people, learning all these extra
skills and training in all different areas from media to doing web pages, Facebook…
learnt how to promote causes and just meeting people from top businesses and
organisations that can actually fund the projects that I am volunteering in, so that’s really
cool.
I think the important thing is to always make volunteering fun and have fun while you are
doing it. Give things a go… you never know what’s going to happen. And the amount of
doors that has opened for me has been amazing, and I have said that to the young
people that I work with now, that they have been really surprised at the opportunities
that they have won and that they can go on to win,
for example the young person of the year for their state and for their community. So
it’s just been amazing seeing other people grow and know that I had some involvement
in it. But I have also been able to draw from my own personal volunteering experience.
If you are out there listening to this, give it a go!