Volunteers... The Heart of Step

We refer to it as our Volunteer Training Day, but it’s much more. Once a term we make a date to gather our volunteers together for a day, with our latest being on Tuesday 13th Jan. We tend to have a ‘soft start’ to help everyone navigate traffic, so the coffee is on from 9.30am and the first session begins at 10am, with a warm welcome and a reflection.
 
Each time we meet the pattern is roughly the same, but the content is variable depending on the time of year. In September we run refresher courses for Safeguarding and Cultural Awareness, as mandatory before volunteers go into the new school year. In May we will run a refresher course for Step Up Days (transition from Primary to Secondary School) that will be delivered in the Summer term.
 
For this Spring term day, we opened with a session on Christian Nationalism. For some of our team this was new, for others it provided additional information, other perspectives, an opportunity to begin an ongoing discussion and signposting to other resources to upskill ourselves.
 
This was followed by participation in our Christian Worship lesson which has been updated and we have bookings to deliver it in schools up to Easter. After lunch we ran two seminars at the same time. One was Identity as part of our Blueprint lessons for year 12 and 13 (6th form) to showcase the content and how it is delivered in school. The other was investigating lunchtime engagement, specifically themed cafes and their potential impact.  
 
Our volunteers are good at letting us know what they think. They have told us how much they enjoy being able to gather (fellowship), share food, have the time to chat to Schools Coordinators about what is coming up and to chat with each other about what they have been doing with Step.

They felt it was helpful to have the updated lesson run for them, challenged by the discussion about Nationalism, and encouraged by how much Step can do in school. Lots of the team appreciated the jacket potato lunch on a cold day!
 
If you are interested in joining us as a volunteer, please contact our Volunteers Coordinator on Terrie@stepschoolswork.org.uk