Last week, when I tabled an Early Day Motion praising university and college students for the massive contribution they make as volunteers. I couldn’t have anticipated seeing such an inspirational example of what I was talking about. The motion draws attentions to the wonderful work that volunteers so all year round and to celebrate Student Volunteering Week, from the 22nd to 28th of February. Since 2001 the week has been an annual fixture. At the end of February thousands of students will join together to give something back to the community, and I find that quite humbling.
Actually young people have been receiving a bad press for thousand of years. Socrates bemoaned the character of young people as rude, discourteous and lazy. If each successive younger generation is so cataclysmically worse than the last how did we can our friends turn out so (reasonably) well? I see part of the answer in the steady stream of interns in my office. Some are American students on study abroad schemes, and other are local students who ask if they can some and work in the office for a few days, on a voluntary basis, to get an idea for what life as an MP is like.
They are hard working and dedicated and I hope that have gained as much from working with me as I have from working with them. In the past year at least two have gone on to jobs as a direct result of working in my office. And my staff volunteer too, in addition to the wonderful work they do for my constituents, one works with children with special needs and another chairs a school’s Board of Governors.
But the inspirational example was meeting students who have worked with reed International to gather books from schools and colleges around the UK and take them to schools in Tanzania. For a rural school that has nothing books and a library are a lifeline. For the Read students I met in Speaker’s House the buzz came from relationships built when they took the books to the school and built the library with local students. Read has now come to South Wales colleges and out students are getting involved with great enthusiasm. It is not a marginal activity – it is vital to our own future.