Your Story Your Voice
Recently I joined a service group called Your Story Your Voice, which a few students in my year group started up a year ago in year 9. Their aim is to help young teenager build their confidence and express themselves.
The group had many events to raise enough money for their service to function. They even participated in a competition where they had to speak out in City Pitch to earn funding and make their group known. They competed against six other teams and won a total of £1,100 for coming first place. There were a total of four judges and even Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London was present. They also had bake sales in the school to increase their funding.
Your Story Your Voice offers peer-to-peer support for students of Walthamstow School for Girls on Wednesday lunchtimes, the girls happily volunteered their support from their own time for the satisfaction of helping others. The students can stay from a minute to as long as half an hour to pour out their worries and troubles. Only two people are present in the room to try and not to overwhelm any students.
To promote their group they had several assemblies for the younger years, consisting of role plays and facts to inform them of the importance of voicing your fears.
Nasanin Rahmani, a member of this group says that ‘we were trained on how to be excellent peer mentors and how to be a good listener, we meet regularly every week to discuss our plans and how to increase the awareness about our group’.
The group has been very successful over the past year and will hopefully continue to do so.
Aisha Hashi
Walthamstow School for Girls
