“Volunteering as a mentor has been a very eye-opening experience”

Joanna, an SMR Analyst for Lloyds Banking Group in Stockport volunteered as a mentor for one of Good Things Foundation’s community partners via her employer’s corporate volunteering scheme. As a mentor, Joanna provided a grassroots community organisation with help carrying out digital tasks, spanning everything from running social media accounts to using online banking, and demonstrating how to help people find employment online. Joanna commented: “I found a lot of joy in seeing that skills and activities I use every day could make such a difference to a centre supporting vulnerable people, or to someone looking for a job.”

Prior to being a mentor, Joanna had been providing one-off volunteering help to local community centres in the Greater Manchester area for a number of years. She says: “I thought a mentoring pilot would be a good step-up, as “volunteering as a mentor was an opportunity for me to work on building a longer-term relationship with a centre, when before when I was just doing volunteering it was one-off feedback and help.” She continues: “I had the digital knowledge they were asking for and I was ready to work on my skills of how to deal, lead and make a difference for the community.”

“There were points when I really had to understand the limitations the organisation had, not only in terms of digital knowledge but also the organisation’s financial limitations.”

Joanna was drawn to mentoring because of the potential it gave her to have a more meaningful impact on an organisation. She commented: “As a mentor, the scale of the impact you can have on an organisation is so much bigger. When you’re supporting a centre, not just a person then you get to help one person with one thing, and they go on to assist another hundred people.”

As well as getting to provide sustained and meaningful support to a centre, being a mentor helped Joanna develop her own skillset, including innovation and negotiation skills. She commented: “There were points when I really had to understand the limitations the organisation had, not only in terms of digital knowledge but also the organisation’s financial limitations. I would suggest ideas for the centre to my mentee and he would say ‘Oooh I don’t know, it’s expensive’, so I learned how to be innovative and bounce back with different suggestions to try and see if there was a more suitable option for them. 

“By understanding just a small percentage of how other people are living, I think people can understand so much more about how to interact with other people.”

When asked whether there were other skills Joanna developed as a mentor that she would be able to apply to her own professional work, she said: “Absolutely! I learned not to assume another person’s situation when I first meet them, which is something I now definitely apply to interactions I have with my own colleagues. Many times you find yourself talking to a colleague and you don’t know how they’re feeling, or you don’t pick up on small things that are really worth noticing. I encounter people every day who have such different lived experiences from my own that I’m not aware of. By understanding just a small percentage of how other people are living, I think people can understand so much more about how to interact with other people.”

“For me, it has been a very eye-opening experience being a mentor. I have become more aware that when you see somebody, you don’t instantly know all the layers of what goes on behind that person. I like to get to know people and learn about the good layers within them, and I hope that people I connect with and find those layers within me when we work together.”