A new volunteering module

This year’s cohort of current Duke of Edinburgh Youth Ambassadors decided to compile a 13-week plan which is filled with resources that will be used to raise important awareness and charitable funds to help those living with hidden disabilities. 

Amelia, one of the co-creators of Raising Awareness for Hidden Disabilities told us about why this module was created  “Myself and the team have created a Volunteering Toolkit for a Bronze DofE Participant to follow and we decided to focus on ‘hidden disabilities. Our generation does not have enough exposure or understanding of hidden disabilities, so we’ve designed a 13-week plan for any Bronze participant to follow with the aim of raising funds for a hidden disabilities charity or raising awareness in their local community.”

To enrol in this course, you must be prepared to volunteer for 1 hour a week during the 13-week time period that has been allocated to complete this course to allow you to make full use of the weekly plan that has been made to go alongside this module but you can extend the amount of work that you focus on each week depending on what DofE  Award level you are currently working on. 

Once you have enrolled in the Raising Awareness for Hidden Disabilities course use the weekly instruction guide to help keep you on track with your awareness and research progress in the form of what hidden disabilities are, how to cope with a hidden disability in your daily life but also how to discuss and ask those close to you the knowledge they have already of hidden disabilities and how much more they would like to discover whether they themselves either know someone in their family or their friend group with a hidden disability or if they have a hidden disability of their own. Let’s get the discussions started and make others understand what to do to support those with hidden disabilities. 

Now you have made others that are close to you aware of the research findings you discovered and why it is so important to spread the word about how hidden disabilities affect others you should start thinking about what fundraising event you want to hold to enable you to vocalise your message of hidden disability even further – if you struggling to think of an event idea look at the fundraising guide to give you some inspiration. 

Now you have come up with a fundraising event idea, you should spread the word, using word of mouth or through posters and social media posts, you may need to ask friends and family at this stage in the process to help share the workload and get tasks done quicker. 

When you feel you have everything you need to hold your fundraising event successfully, make any last-minute changes or final arrangements in the last week before your event takes place to ensure that your fundraiser will run smoothly on the day. 

On the day of your fundraising event make sure that you take photos and videos to share with us which will be great to look back on but also will be brilliant evidence on EDofE to share with your DofE leader. 

Overall, taking part in this course will enable you to learn more knowledge and information that you may not have heard of before when it comes to raising awareness about hidden disabilities to give you more understanding and empathy towards those that experience these which enables you to have learnt something meaningful and worthwhile which can then be passed to others to do the same and stand with those who experience hidden disabilities.