Volunteering as a digital champion

I'd like to share with you how I came to be a digital champion. I'm an avid reader and was returning a book to the library which I’d found really heart warming. It was a novel about how a community fought hard to prevent their library from closing. I got chatting to one of the librarians at my local library about the book.

It brought to life how different individuals use this local resource. A teenage girl who came from a large family used the space to study in a quiet place for her exams. An elderly man did the crossword each day, interacted with other people and was warm and comfortable. A lady who had recently come to Britain came to borrow cookery books and doing so made some good friends.

I was working as a volunteer in the local Cancer Research Shop, also recording a monthly book review for the talking magazine which is published at Walthew House.

She explained about the DigiKnow initiative and handed me a leaflet about it. This really sparked my interest and soon I enrolled to do some training with Starting Point. The training was excellent and gave me a chance to meet other volunteers via the Teams application.

I'm by no means an expert, but between us the team of volunteers can usually solve most issues, and if not, we can research it for the following week. I've learnt a lot already and look forward each week to meeting great people with a huge variety of questions who come to the drop-in sessions.

Find out more about how to become a digital champion.