Volunteering in Athlone to get more involved in the community

Reaching out to others is easier than you think.

Working to keep Athlone clean and tidy! Picture credits: Paola Bassanese

Life as an expat often means that you don’t have a ready-made circle of friends as soon as you arrive to a new country.

While I’ve been living in Ireland for five years, it has only been since the last couple of years that I have made more friends, built new connections and started activities that were not related to work. Talking of work: because I am self-employed, a big proportion of my spare time is dedicated to business development and seeking new projects.

There are so many volunteering opportunities in Athlone and throughout Ireland

Whether you are new to Ireland or you are a local, volunteering can open up so many opportunities to meet new people, sometimes helping you to learn something new or put into practice some skills that you have but never got the chance to use in your job or other areas of life.

I found out about volunteering in a number of ways including:

• the local paper

• social media

• a volunteering website called Volunteer Ireland.

You can choose your level of commitment based on how much spare time you have.

Volunteering projects I have taken part in so far

Alongside the volunteering projects I took part in, I am also including a couple of fundraising events I organised, so here’s the list with a few details about each project:

• fundraising for the RNLI, a UK and Ireland organisation that provides a rescue service at sea, lakes and rivers

• having English conversations with language learners through New Horizon, a charity based in Athlone working with refugees

• creating content for the RTÉ All Ireland Drama Festival, an organisation that manages an annual theatre festival

• picking up litter with Athlone Tidy Towns, an environmental initiative that awards the collective efforts in Irish towns to keep them clean from litter and present them in the best possible light

• fundraising for the Shannon Fringe Music Festival or Féile na Sionainne, an event showcasing traditional Irish music in Athlone as part of the national Fleadh Festival.

Would I recommend doing volunteering in Ireland? Yes.

You don’t need to be an expat to benefit from volunteering; in fact, many local Irish people are volunteers in their spare time. I would say that if you are new to an area in Ireland, becoming a volunteer will certainly open some doors for you, including giving you networking opportunities in case you are looking for work. You could even consider volunteering as a type of internship, as you get the chance to put your skills to good use and learn new ones, while also expanding your circle of contacts. One thing I have noticed, living in Athlone, is that word of mouth is so important, making it an essential way to find out about job opportunities and to be recommended for roles.

Another advantage of taking part in volunteering projects, especially in smaller towns such as Athlone, is that you get to hear about what is going on in your local area. For example, if you are involved in a festival such as the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, there are so many events that happen alongside it such as traditional Irish music and Irish dance performances, and you get to hear about them first, even before the newspapers do.

Skills I have used while volunteering

These are some examples of the skills I applied and acquired when I took part in volunteering projects:

• writing web content and creating video content including shooting footage and editing;

• organising small fundraising events such as a cute pizza party that was so much fun, as I got to prepare homemade pizzas and had conversations with many people;

• using my English speaking skills to help language learners and offering my perspective as a lifelong learner of English, since I am a native Italian speaker and I can understand the struggle and challenges of switching between two languages.

In a nutshell, I discovered I had leadership skills I didn’t know I had as you need to be able to hold your own in a crowd, and I used my sense of initiative to come up with ideas and find solutions. These are all transferable qualities that you can apply in your current job if you are an employee or in your business activity if you are self-employed.