Youth Xchange: Volunteers' Stories - Maddy Holmes-Skelton 

Maddy's story helps to answer a question people often ask "what can I do?". Proving a hot meal and a friendly ear can be just as valuable as any other skill a volunteer can provide.

The biggest learning curve for me so far on this programme has been the things I have learnt and seen within the work I’ve been doing at Midland Heart organisation. I’ve been working with people with mental health issues due to substance abuse issues such as alcohol and drug addictions. In my time I’ve been surrounded with people at a similar age to myself who have been involved in drug taking but working with the clients I began to realise I’d never really seen the effects that serious drug taking can lead too. I at first
found it difficult to know how to approach the customers and was unaware how to behave and to communicate with them and vice versa with them to me, but over due time we began to get used to each other and the customers began to feel comfortable enough around me to express how they got into the situation they were in living in (homeless sheltered housing) and I saw firsthand the issues they had to deal with on a daily basis, a lot of the people were over the age of 40 and men but still had the behavioural patterns of 16 year old boys because there were certain parts of their brains that had never been able or allowed themselves to develop into fully dependant people. I hear the mistakes they had made, the opportunities they had missed and saw the way they were suffering from them. An addiction is a serious illness that can take over your life and can lead to so many other problems such as inept social abilities, paranoia, schizophrenia and chronic low self esteem. This has given me the push to want to spend more time working alongside people to help them through and find a way to either become a more able person, or help them recover the life they had before.

The photo shows me preparing a meal to serve some of the customers I worked closely with and just cooking a good healthy meal for them and having a good chat whilst eating, you could see the appreciation they had all over their faces and the way they respected us for it afterwards, it was like nobody had ever done anything for them before and it gave them the confidence to just put a tiny bit of trust into somebody, which seemed to be so rare for them to be able to do.