Future Arts Blog

A brief look at my experience

The job mar­ket is dif­fi­cult in cur­rent cli­mate and for me the whole sit­u­a­tion was dri­ving me crazy. With 1.04 mil­lion 18–24 year olds unem­ployed, actu­ally get­ting a job inter­view was the hard bit. As some­one who had worked from the age of 15, being unem­ployed I found men­tally and phys­i­cally strain­ing. Even as some­one who had a degree, I was find­ing it dif­fi­cult, hav­ing applied for grad­u­ate pro­grams and not get­ting any­where was soul destroy­ing, often being told that I was overqual­i­fied for posi­tions I was keen to get into. To tell the truth depres­sion took hold as the same rou­tine dragged on for nearly three months. It was at this point that my mum sug­gested the won­der­ful world of vol­un­teer­ing, some­thing I had done as a teen,  mil­len­nium vol­un­teers,  but to which I hadn’t even thought about. My first instinct was to go to Vol­un­tary Action Leeds and see pre­cisely what they had to offer, I mean I’m not great with kids, ani­mals, nature is a big no no, and sick peo­ple, well obvi­ously I empathise with them but its not really me. I saw adver­tise­ment but the major­ity took, 3–4 weeks to process my appli­ca­tion, could I sur­vive that long? Seri­ously it seemed like a long draw out process. Three days or so later, an adver­tise­ment popped up on two places that had been watch­ing, both adver­tis­ing vol­un­tary place­ments at Future Arts.

Future Arts, was some­where that was dif­fer­ent, it was some­where that firstly I had never heard of, but who had a great web­site, yes I judged the place on the web­site. I have always been inter­ested in dig­i­tal media and was keen to get into event man­age­ment and PR. Both of these were areas that Future Arts catered for. So I sent off my CV, and cov­er­ing let­ter, I was keen to do this so I sent off a ref­er­ence. Two days went by and noth­ing. So I e-mail them again, the next day I get a phone call, say­ing they were really sorry had been really busy and would I come for an induc­tion the fol­low­ing Friday.

After my induc­tion, I started the fol­low­ing Tues­day, I was a lit­tle fright­ened but the staff and other vol­un­teers were so nice and even the young peo­ple were polite. I started on my first big task which would be plan­ning an event for the launch of a new prod­uct. I was thrilled and as my time grew and my con­fi­dence grew, I received more respon­si­bil­ity. I felt like I was mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, and as the work towards the event veered off I wanted to help in other areas of the busi­ness such as admin­is­tra­tion and pub­lic rela­tions. My expe­ri­ence at Future Arts was sec­ond to none, I had never worked any­where where I felt that the work I was doing was mak­ing a dif­fer­ence to soci­ety as a whole.

If want to vol­un­teer with Future Arts, please e-mail your CV and Cover let­ter to volunteers@futurearts.co.uk