Volunteers Week 2019

Here at SATRO, we owe a huge thank you to our volunteers. They are vital to us and we certainly couldn’t do what we do without them! We know it is important that volunteers feel valued and that their employers know their staff have had a productive and positive experience with us. Many of our volunteers sign up so they can ‘make a difference’ to young people and are frequently surprised by how much they have learnt from the experience themselves. 

We asked Nick from Sanofi who volunteers as a Mentor for SATRO why he does it? Here's what he had to say... 

"Next week I'll be visiting with my year 11 student for the last time as she starts her GCSE's the very next day. It's been an amazing journey for us, it all began with a tour of the school where she declared "This is like meeting my dad for the first time" I replied with the obvious dad joke, "I'm pretty sure I'm not your father!" and our relationship went from there with the same openness and innocence as that opening conversation.

I joined SATRO thinking that it would be like Good Will Hunting, I thought there would be this Math’s genius who needed help setting their talent free, but I quickly realised that there were more pressing issues that the school wanted our help with.

It was confirmed after a few visits that the students of the scheme were in a special group of students who had difficult backgrounds and as such they wanted us to be there for them. That was a relief to me as it meant that I went from trying to push complicated ideas and concepts to just being there. And I made the amazing student a promise at that point (more on her later), I'm going to prove to her that in her life there's going to be a guy that always shows up, that's it, I'm going to relentlessly show up for her, listen to her and show her that we can be nice, dependable and be there for her.

Turns out that was all she ever needed, no algebra on a blackboard or hypothesis, she just needed to know that she was worthy of being listened to, and hopefully those GCSE's will take care of themselves as a result... (fingers crossed)

So if you're thinking of volunteering.. go do it, it might just change lives." - Nick, SANOFI