Dylan’s Duke of Edinburgh Volunteering

At Stripey Stork, we provide volunteering opportunities for young people working towards their Duke of Edinburgh Award. As part of their award they are required to complete a set number of volunteer hours. We offer weekly volunteer sessions for students at the bronze, silver, and gold levels. Dylan,  volunteered with us for 20 months and completed his silver and Gold awards. Here he writes about his experience.

I was fortunate enough to have been able to complete my Silver and Gold Duke of Edinburgh volunteering awards at Stripey Stork. I started my Silver award in January 2023 and went on to complete both my Silver and Gold awards by the end of August 2024 after a combined total of 62 individual sessions. In the beginning the range of tasks presented to me seemed vast at first, I started out like most DofE volunteers do on the sorting table where I was quickly taught the ways in which donated clothing is sorted and quality controlled before being made up into individual packs for young people, that then get sent out to referral partners. I found this task hugely rewarding, although seemingly simple at a first glance it was often the little things, like hand selecting a book or a toy that would hopefully bring joy to a child that reminded me of the greater impact of making up clothing packs, and I can still remember the feeling of accomplishment that I felt after making up my first pack, it’s a feeling that stuck with me. This rewarding feeling was later compounded by a referral partner speaking at one of the sessions about the first-hand impacts that she had witnessed within specific families in need and how the donated clothing packs were able to partly assist families find their feet again after a variety of lifechanging events.

As you can imagine over my 62 sessions I covered a wide array of tasks such as: quality control checking and cleaning toys, moving stock around the warehouse to be moved to Stripey Storks other facility Raven House, sorting shoes of all shapes and sizes, unpacking donations from local businesses and organisations, emptying the clothing recycling bins, the assembly of cots, cleaning of various equipment and assembling buggies and prams. The list really does go on.

No two weeks tasks were the same and this is something that I found thoroughly enjoyable, being a practical person I soon found myself paired with the more hands on jobs, like building buggies or assembling cots and I thoroughly enjoyed these activities as at the end of my session, more often than not I had something physical and beneficial like a buggy to show for my work. Something that I found to be unique about Stripey Stork was that no matter what your personal strengths are Stripey Stork have a task best suited for you, and if you don’t find a particular task to be your favourite then there are plenty of others for you to immerse yourself in. From my Bronze volunteering experience I found that other providers often have set tasks for volunteers to complete, whereas in the same session at Stripey Stork you could find yourself, like I did going from two completely different tasks and always feeling a genuine sense of achievement or personal development by the end of a session, perhaps by doing a task that previously you hadn’t done before or maybe never expected to find yourself doing.

Over my time at Stripey Stork I developed a variety of transferable skills. I found that my communication skills had benefitted from interacting with the many other likeminded volunteers and my ability to effectively work within a team to complete a given task had also strengthened. Volunteering also provided me with the invaluable opportunity to meet other likeminded young people that I otherwise would never have had the chance to have gotten to know.

If you would like to find out more about doing your Duke of Edinburgh volunteering with Stripey Stork visit our website.