I've recently started volunteering at Friends Action North East. I'm in my second year at university studying Psychology and have chosen to do a year long placement alongside my course, choosing to do this with FANE, a decision I am very happy with. FANE is an amazing organization that help people with learning disabilities create and maintain friendships. Although I am not sure what direction I want to go in in the future in terms of my career this is something that interests me and that I will no doubt find a lot of satisfaction in.

I have been to a couple of FANE events so far, the most recent one being a Get Out There Group. The idea of this group is to get a group of people out and about reviewing venues. The group go to different locations, experience the service and the all round atmosphere of the place and review the venue in terms of accessibility, facilities for the deaf, blind and disabled  and whether it is a Safe Place. The Safe Place scheme is something I had never heard of before joining the GOTG, its a brilliant scheme which basically sign posts different establishments as a short term 'safe place' to go if you are a vulnerable person and are feeling threatened when out and about in your local community. Things like this are little pieces of knowledge that I'm picking up along the way enhancing my experience in more ways than I first anticipated volunteering would.

In the GOTG I recently went to we visited a dessert establishment called Creams, it was such a fun experience, made even better by the endless choice of desserts to choose from! We all sat down together and first had a bit of time to just experience the place, chatting, deciding which mountain of ice cream we were going to tackle, and generally just taking in our surroundings. Once we had had some time there we took a bit of time to really think about the venue itself and all filled out a quick review sheet rating it on different aspects. At the same time we had a word with one of the members of staff, who actually turned out to be the manager, and asked him a couple of things that we could not find out ourselves (guide dogs permitted, deaf/blind facilities). He was a lovely man who had all the time in the world for our questions and was very keen when we informed him about being able to become a Safe Place, he made us feel very welcomed and even offered us a free drink! All round it was a great establishment and we all agreed somewhere that we would definitely recommend to go. The experience for me was one that I was slightly apprehensive about due to never having done anything similar, but I was immediately put at ease by the group, they were a lovely bunch of people and made the whole thing much more enjoyable, something I would definitely like to do again.

From what I have seen of FANE so far they do good work and are built around a community of caring people. There are always opportunities to help out and volunteer and I would encourage anyone to do so. I'm excited to see what I can do in the future to contribute to FANE and I'm really looking forward to continuing working with all the people involved.