A different kind of work day

Last year I blogged about a team volunteering event at a local farm, where we spent the day doing manual labour clearing brambles and bushes and other horrible things!

Last week, our team volunteered again, this time in Birmingham, running something called Money Live. I genuinely feel lucky that I work for a company that actively encourages volunteering, and the day was certainly a very different kind of work day for me!

Money Live is a Financial Education experience for young people, where they visit different scenarios on the Safe Side 'street'. The volunteers (us!) run interactive sessions where they can learn about savings accounts and ATMs (in the mini Nationwide branch), budgeting and looking for best value offers (in the mini Co-op store), about online safety in the internet cafe, find about bankruptcy in the model court, look at bills and payments in the house and clamber on the double decker bus to learn about credits and debits.

How did they get the bus in there?

The team getting ready before the kids arrived!!

Kat was the judge in the court - complete with wig!

The kids have to decide on the verdict in the court... we may have practiced before they arrived!

Chris and his branch!

Vicky ran the Co-op for the day!

No idea why I'm on this bike!

I had no idea what to expect. I don't have kids, so I will admit that I was worried about even speaking to them! I ran the internet cafe, geek that I am, and talked about keeping your money safe. I showed them about ATM skimming devices and talked about identity theft and fraud. I learned a lot too!

The sessions are normally run for years 9 - 11, so secondary school pupils. To make it even tougher, we were told that we running a pilot session for primary school children! But we needn't have worried - they were so engaged, and pretty fascinated about everything. Willing to have a go and try and work out interest rates and percentages, and were pretty knowledgeable about internet shopping in my session!

It was an incredibly worthwhile way to spend a day, and all of our team are just lining up for another opportunity to do it again. Even if the kids take one thing away, hopefully we've done a good job. It was a genuinely fantastic resource - and they run sessions on lots of different topics, like safety and life skills, and I really enjoyed taking part.