TO celebrate the Year of Young People, every week in 2018 The National is giving a platform to young Scots. This week, 15-year-old Police Scotland Youth Volunteer Sophie Ross.
I WAS at the stage in my life where I was having a tough time and I had stopped going to all my other extracurricular clubs.
I didn’t want to do anything other than sit at home. I took every day as it came and some days I struggled to even get through school. My mum had been coming home from work one day and had passed a police van recruiting for Police Scotland Youth Volunteers (PSYV) in the high street.
The next day she dragged me into town where I picked up an application form and the next thing I remember I was at the police station for the first time in my life for an interview. It went badly: and that’s me sugar-coating it. My mum talked more than I did, and I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get in.
A year passed, and I still felt lost. I wasn’t a mathematical genius, a linguistic master or a sports superstar and I had nothing to be proud of. I didn’t particularly excel at anything and I had no idea what I wanted to do in the future.
But I was a member of PSYV now, having decided to apply again, and it gave me the push I desperately needed. I realised that helping people is what I was good at and it was something I could be proud of.
As a part of PSYV I get a chance to contribute to my community, be it helping at a local cycling race or teaching primary school children about online safety. We raise money for local charities and we see the impact it has on our community.
My group fundraises for Scotland’s Charity Air Ambulance and we get to visit their base and discover how our hard work can literally save lives. Learning how our work affects the people around us and knowing that we are helping people makes everything worthwhile.
In the summer I had the amazing opportunity to be a part of a group which co-designed and co-hosted a parliamentary reception in conjunction with the Scottish Government and the Justice Secretary. This was something I could have never dreamt of being part of and it will be an experience I will never forget.
Everybody volunteers for a reason. I did it to gain confidence, but I got so much more out of it than that. It showed me that I am helpful, I am strong and that I can do things I never thought possible. It has been invaluable to my personal development and I couldn’t recommend volunteering enough, whether it’s a few hours a week at a local charity shop or committing to something like PSYV. You can make such a difference to your community and it could change your life for the better too.
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