Our Better Together project has been running in West Leeds since 2017. Delivering community groups and events to promote local health and wellbeing campaigns and services. One of our volunteers, Reema, shares their experience of supporting a community group in West Leeds.
I started volunteering with Barca at their ‘Back to Beginnings‘ English group around March 2022. It was a class based on teaching spoken and written English for people whose first language isn’t English.
To say it was a great experience is an understatement! I was volunteering under Jahanara, a Barca employee, and was conducting classes at Armley Community Centre.
We started off as a small group of around 6 people and by the time the sessions ended we were around 15 which went to show how popular the class became.
There were people from varied backgrounds and countries. We had families from Ukraine, Kurdistan, Pakistan, India, China, Africa, all who had come to better their English in the hope of adjusting better in society.
It is humbling to meet people who overcome fear and consciousness and try to learn a language to their best abilities. We used to have a lot of fun as well. The class was designed to make it interesting for them so we had a lot of interactive sessions, some games [and] some group activities to help them master the language.
Initially I started off helping students do their daily exercises. Then slowly when the class started to increase, we had people [attending] with different levels of English so I used to run a beginner’s group all by myself. A few times, Julia (Barca-Leeds Apprentice) joined us and we did it together.
To see a person make progress gives you great pleasure and while volunteering I progressed personally too. I learned to interact with people without words, learned to take charge of small groups and conduct sessions that were beneficial to them. I learned to work in groups, work independently and prepare educational material, among other things.
Volunteering at ‘Back to Beginnings’ was a start for me too in realising my potential and eventually my dreams.
