Spain: Volunteering, the will to change

Volunteering is not a fashion. It is an experience that changes you as a person. Volunteering is giving for the pleasure of giving, expecting nothing in return. Giving your time, your words, your skills, your fears. All to help create a better social reality. It may sound utopian, but volunteering changes your life.

The first steps
My first volunteering experience was with Intermòn-Oxfam International in my native city, Cuenca, Spain, when I was 19 years old. I got into volunteering almost by chance, looking for a different way to fill my time that would bring me new skills and the chance to express myself in an informal space, outside University walls. I only applied to help out in the organisation of an event, but shortly I found myself immersed in a range of other activities, like coordinating volunteers, organising press campaigns, events. Two years had suddenly flown by.

This first volunteering experience helped me discover that I possessed a number of skills, and most of all it helped me to perceive reality in a new and different way. Volunteering is one of the simplest ways to understand society, yourself, and of what you can do to change the aspects of both that you don?t like.

Encouraged by my experience at Oxfam I tried out other types of associations and I began experimenting with my own small initiatives. This is how I came to unite two of my passions – journalism and volunteering ? through a radio show on an independent radio station in Segovia, where I was studying. We brought good practices to the show. We invited volunteers and NGOs to talk and placed their activities within social, political and international contexts, finding the common ground between social needs and simple volunteering actions.

To many volunteering represents a temporary thing, something you do when you are young or when you are in a certain circumstance. But it has become an important part of my life.

Europe opens its doors
In 2003 I bumped into the European Volunteering Service (EVS) a programme financed by the European Commission. The EVS took me to Romania, where volunteering took a strong hold on my life again. The organisation that welcomed me in Romania gave me the opportunity to develop a project of my own that I had been thinking of for some time and that was tied to my profession as a journalist.

During my year long EVS I developed a project called Brainstorming, a bilingual (English-Romanian) magazine with articles from young journalists from across the world. The focus was for them to write about the social problems that they felt affected by. The project was a challenge from the start. First of all were the cultural and linguistic differences, the problems of suddenly finding myself in a small city of 100 thousand inhabitants in Northern Romania called Sucaeva that I had never even heard of before!

Added to this were the conceptual challenges of having to pull a work group together with no resources, an international group of journalists who would be willing to write articles without being paid. But the harder it got the more we all wanted this project to succeed and the greater the will the more the number of young people who were interested in participating. Step by step my satisfaction grew, and finally the magazine was actually created.

Seeing how the volunteer effort of a great many people managed to create an international project that brought together young people from the five continents with a common goal was one of the happiest moments of my EVS. Our common goal was to highlight social problems, to give voice to youth issues and to create debate between young people about best practices and solutions.

From volunteer to social entrepreneur
This project changed my life and gave me a career. What was meant to be a years experience brought me to settle in Romania for good, to found an NGO dedicated to using journalism as a tool for social transformation, to embrace new technologies in order to expand this vision. I suddenly became a social actor 24 hours a day, instead of just a couple of hours a week. I became a self
employee with a cause, a social entrepreneur.

Through volunteering I learned that the only barriers that exist are those of our minds, that the only limits are those that we impose on our selves. I understood that problems are the same everywhere, they just have different hues. Most of all, I learned that volunteering changes things. It changes them because it changes your perspective, it helps you see society, people and problems through different eyes and this new vision helps you identify possibilities and solutions.

More info:
www.brain-storming.info