Give Back Article - Part 2
In line with Twinkl’s Giving Back month, I was asked to meet and write about people around the company that do something to contribute to their communities, charities, or society as a whole. It was a great commission. Not only did I get to meet some fascinating people, but there were so many good people doing good things that they wouldn’t all fit into one article.
This is Part 2. You can read Part 1 here.
So, without further ado, here’s the Travelling Teacher (Pete Baxter), the Volunteer (Chloe Ma), the Yoga Instructor (Eleri Foxhall), the Swift-Saver (Laura Lian) and the Librarian (Natalie Ring).
The Travelling Teacher
Pete Baxter is a Content Editor at Twinkl. He’s travelled to forty countries and blogged about his experiences on his website. He’s taught in locations all over the world, but now lives in Totnes, in Devon.
‘I started a Facebook group and Crowdfunder page for the victims of the war in Ukraine,’ he says. ‘It was non-political. I called a meeting and a local café owner lent us her premises for the meeting. Being Totnes, a lot of people turned up with strong opinions.’
The general feeling, Pete says, was that there were certain groups the meeting attendees didn’t want to support, like the Red Cross. This was because of a number of scandals, regarding alleged abuse by aid workers in Africa. Pete was disappointed, having worked with the Red Cross in Hungary during the Syrian refugee crisis, and was impressed by their work. But, in the end, the group decided to support United World Kitchen and Médecins Sans Frontières. They got in touch with local businesses, got the crowdfunding campaign going, reached out to people they knew and managed to raise about £400.
‘At the next meeting, a guy called Rob suggested we grow and sell sunflowers, the national flower of Ukraine,’ Pete says. ‘We got in touch with local garden centres and asked if they’d sell the flowers for us. That raised another £480.’
Pete’s group have linked with another group nearby, that hosts Ukrainian refugees in the UK. It’s not usually money that the refugees need, but shelter and support in other ways.
‘In the group, there’s the feeling that the work isn’t done yet,’ Pete says. ‘People don’t want to disband, but we’re still working out what the next step should be. People have so many opinions about this kind of thing. Depending on who you speak to, you can have very different ideas about what people need. But the will to help is there. It can just be a bit of a juggling act keeping everyone on board and happy.’
This isn’t Pete’s first brush with a humanitarian crisis. He was teaching in Slovakia in 2016, when Syrian refugees were crossing Europe on foot. With his wife and daughter, Pete started to collect donations to take down to the border for when the refugees arrived.
‘It was getting on for winter and these people were arriving in sandals,’ he says. ‘They’d get dropped off at the Hungarian border on a train and then marched into Austria. The taxi drivers would charge them €50 for a taxi to Vienna, exploiting them. Every weekend, the drivers put the fare up, so they ended up charging about €100, when it only cost €40 to travel a similar distance.’
At the time, Pete’s daughter was five years old. One day, she asked her mum why more people didn’t help the refugees. She wanted to write to the queen, as Pete had just finished reading her Roald Dahl’s The BFG, in which the BFG appeals to the queen for help. Her mum explained that it might be because the refugees were different — they had darker skin and believed in a different God. She said some people might be frightened of them. Pete’s daughter laughed and laughed.
‘Seeing it from her perspective kept us going,’ Pete says. ‘Because, to her, it was really simple. These people need our help, so why wouldn’t you help them?’
Pete and his family volunteered in a Red Cross Depot, a massive warehouse with beds in it, where they sorted clothes and made sandwiches. Eventually, they were given jackets and a password to say to the border police who were, at best, indifferent, at worst, hostile to both refugees and volunteers.
‘It got to the point where you saw the same people volunteering every week,’ Pete says. ‘They became friends. There was a guy we met from Leeds who’d driven down in a lorry full of stuff. He was trying to get to Greece, but was turned around at gunpoint by border control.’
Helping others isn’t always easy, but that often means it’s more important that you do it. After a while, the Hungarian authorities closed the border and put up a razor-wire fence to stop refugees crossing. But the refugees would already be on trains, waiting to be able to get off. Authorities kept the trains immobile, saying there were no drivers and locked the doors, sometimes for two or three days, with the refugees still on board.
‘You can imagine what the toilets get like after two or three days,’ Pete says. ‘By the time they arrived, they were pretty traumatised.’
Many of the encounters Pete had stayed with him. Though this happened six years ago, he can recount conversations as though they happened yesterday.
‘The Arabic culture is very proud,’ he says. ‘Particularly women. There was a man pushing his wife in a wheelchair. Both of them were elderly. The lady had trench foot, but she wouldn’t take her socks off to show me. She would only show my wife. What we learned was that these were normal, working people. There was a guy that came into the Red Cross depot that was very debonair, wearing a suit and shoes, but no socks. I told my daughter to take him some socks and he was so incredibly grateful. He took her head and kissed her on the forehead and kept saying, ‘marshallah, marshallah,’ which is like saying ‘sweetie-pie.’’
The man didn’t have much English and Pete knew only a little Arabic, but they managed to have a conversation. The man said, ‘My house down.’ He had two daughters with him, who he was trying to get to University. He asked Pete whether he should aim for Germany or the UK.
‘At that point, England had pulled up the drawbridge, so I told him Germany was open and they might be able to continue their studies there,’ Pete says. ‘They weren’t with the mother — I assume the mother was killed in the raid. He was a professional, well-educated guy. Well-dressed but covered in mud and without socks. You can walk away from it all but you want to go back.’
Bratislava, where Pete and his family were staying, gets down to minus 20 in the winter. He remembers watching the rain out on the balcony and thinking about the people that were still outside. He knew they wouldn’t be able to last long in those conditions, already exhausted, already hungry.
‘You do have to lose the sensitivity slightly,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, you just can’t cope with it. But I do still feel quite emotional about that time. I think on some level we were all quite traumatised by what we saw. But you have to get on with your life. It’s only when you have cause to talk about it or something triggers it that you realise there’s an element of shock still with you, that you can’t compartmentalise. It doesn’t take much to open the lid.’
While Pete was volunteering with his wife and daughter, he came across a Swiss woman who was a children’s entertainer. She had two canes with a rope between them, which she dipped into a bucket of washing-up liquid and blew enormous bubbles. At first, Pete thought bubbles would be pretty low down the list of priorities for people who didn’t have shoes or food to eat, but then the children started laughing.
‘It was the first time they could play for a long time,’ he says. ‘They were running around and laughing. It was just an everyday thing but it made them smile. That woman was giving back in that way.’
Often, situations like the war in Ukraine, and the refugee crisis can feel huge, complicated and insurmountable. Far too much for one small person to do anything about. But small people can do small things that make a big difference. Driving down to the border with some supplies. Starting a Facebook group. Blowing a bubble.
They’re small things, small steps, but small steps can get you over a border.
The Volunteer
Chloe Ma is a Skills & Communication Specialist at Twinkl. The traits that make her good at her job at Twinkl make her an invaluable volunteer for the two charities she’s involved with: Caudwell Children and Shout 8525.
Shout is a mental health crisis text helpline, designed to prevent suicide. People can text the service at any time to get support from an advisor, like Chloe. The helpline is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
‘The other volunteering work I do for Caudwell Children has the title Volunteer Engagement Intern,’ Chloe says, ‘but it’s basically what I do for Twinkl. I create learning and training materials for volunteers working for the charity.’
Cauldwell Children support families with children that have disabilities. They help people access services, equipment, therapies and any treatments they might need.
Volunteering for one charity is impressive, but it’s amazing that Chloe has the time for two, alongside her job at Twinkl.
‘I do about two to four hours a week for each charity,’ Chloe says. ‘I can do the work for Cauldwell Children whenever I have a spare moment, but with Shout, it’s not the same. You can’t be halfway through a conversation with someone and just leave. The nature of that work means I have to have a slightly more robust shift pattern.’
Chloe’s learned the importance of scheduling and giving herself clear boundaries. When she first started volunteering for Shout, she opted to help the whole weekend. But the nature of this particular kind of voluntary work can be emotionally draining; she’s talking to people in crisis. You need twenty-four hours of training before you go live on the text line and, for the first few sessions, you need to be monitored by a supervisor. Some of the people that contact the service have very serious mental health conditions, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Taking responsibility for that all weekend, after a week of full-time work, could be a route to burnout.
But Chloe doesn’t see her voluntary work as a sacrifice. It’s something she’s always done, something her family always emphasised — Chloe and her brother used to donate their birthday money to charity. Their family believes in karma, the idea that good deeds contribute to a store of good energy that is then dispensed to your family and others you care about. But you don’t need to believe in karma to understand why Chloe does what she does.
‘When I was at university, I volunteered at Age UK’s Clicksilver project,’ Chloe says. ‘It was basically about helping elderly people learn to use technology. Doing that, I met one of my favourite people on Earth. Her name is Hazel (82 years young) and we go swimming together now every week. She really loves my scones and I make really good dumplings as well, so she basically just takes advantage of my food!’
Since meeting Hazel, Chloe’s become even more passionate about volunteering and more determined to help as many people as possible. It’s time-consuming and extremely specialised — it’s possible to get this sort of work very wrong. And yet, Chloe loves it. She makes it sound exciting, helping other people. Like the most fun, you’ll ever have. She makes you want to help people, too.
The Yoga Instructor
Eleri Foxhall is a Content Writer and Welsh Translator at Twinkl. When she’s not writing and translating, she runs her own yoga business, Iogis Bach, in North Wales. She runs baby yoga and massage sessions, as well as yoga sessions for children in schools. After running a giveaway for schools in her local area, she’s started running free classes in schools.
‘The feedback has been amazing,’ Eleri says. ‘I used to be a teacher myself, so I know school budgets are really tight and teachers don’t have the time to do wellbeing stuff. It was really nice to go in and take pressure off the teaching staff for an hour. The children really enjoyed it and, hopefully, they’ll have skills to take away with them. It was a really positive experience.’
Eleri’s received a grant to help her set up her yoga business. Then, when she was able, she wanted to run the free classes as a way to give back to the local community.
‘I want children to be able to use the mindfulness techniques from the classes so they can use them in later life,’ she explains. ‘When I was growing up, there wasn’t anything like this. When I think back to when I was studying for my GCSEs, I could have done with someone teaching me ways to calm my nerves and not worry so much. It would have made a big difference back then.’
Eleri says she can see the difference in children, even within a single session. She says a lot of children don’t know how to breathe properly; when they breathe in, they suck in their stomachs when, really, they should be allowing themselves to inflate with air before exhaling. Techniques like this can have a huge difference on the nervous system and concentration levels. So, if children can master these skills early, they’ll be much better equipped to deal with stress later on.
The older boys are often her trickiest targets, but telling them that footballers practise yoga is normally enough to win them around.
‘I understand that yoga isn’t for everyone,’ Eleri says. ‘I think a lot of stuff on social media can be quite intimidating, especially for women starting out. It can be easy to think, ‘I don’t look like that, so it’s not for me.’ Well, I don’t look like that either, but I can still practise yoga. It is for everybody, and I try and emphasise that with everyone I work with. It should be accessible to everyone. You shouldn’t have to look a certain way. It’s something I struggled with in the beginning, but I’ve got over it now.’
Eleri is calm and serene — an excellent advertisement for yoga. And she’s on a calm, serene mission. She’s like to grow her business and employ another team member, but her main goal is to make yoga more accessible; she offers concessions to families that are struggling.
‘I’m taking it day by day for now,’ she says. Of course she is — she’s being mindful about it. Enjoying every step, every good bit of feedback, every child that enjoys a class, without worrying about what’s around the corner.
The Swift-Saver
Laura Lian is a Design Support Content Writer at Twinkl. She’s also one-half of a conservation group created to raise awareness of the common swift.
Common swifts have been around for 65 million years. They migrate from Africa to Northern Europe each year, meaning they have one of the longest migrations of any animal. It’s not a danger-free journey — there’s plenty that can befall them on the way — and an added complication is that, when they reach Europe, they always return to the same nest. Swifts can live for up to twenty years, which means twenty consecutive years of flying to the same spot, in the same roof, to lay their eggs.
But not many humans know this.
‘Over the last few decades, a lot of people have been doing roof renovations, and they end up blocking the holes where the nests are,’ says Laura. ‘Nests aren’t protected unless they’re in use. In the summer, when the swifts are here, we can get the police involved if someone’s trying to block a nest. We did that in Crookes recently. We had to get some scaffolders to take the scaffolding down because there were lots of birds flying around the building in circles, unable to reach their nests. Blocking nests is a wildlife crime against the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981).’
But the rest of the year, the nests aren’t protected. Laura and her group work to raise awareness, to stop as many nests from being destroyed as possible, and also to encourage people to put up swift boxes, designated places for them to make their nests.
‘Since we started in July 2021, we’ve put up more than 200 swift boxes,’ Laura says.
Not bad at all, especially considering Laura only heard of swifts a few years ago.
‘Where I now live in Hillsborough, north Sheffield, they come back every year,’ she says. ‘So I was seeing them a lot and hearing them too. When they’re together, they’re called a ‘screaming party’. They really do scream as they fly, and they fly quite low. You don’t confuse them with anything else — they’re clearly quite a different bird. So I started noticing them and then did a bit of research. It was during lockdown that I joined a Facebook group for swift enthusiasts.’
It was then that Laura began to understand just how much trouble the swift population were in. Their numbers had dropped 58% by 1995. For an animal that’s been around 65 million years, that’s a very steep, very sudden decline.
So Laura joined forces with two other ladies nearby and began to encourage people to put boxes up in their local community. They were surprised by how many people were keen to help, and they found a fitter that would install the boxes at a reduced rate because he liked birds.
‘That was last summer,’ Laura says. ‘We’d have fitting days when ten houses would have boxes fitted — we did that pretty regularly.’
But, in October, one of the three women in the group, Emma, died of cancer.
‘I was devastated,’ says Laura. ‘I wrote a poem about swifts and read it at Emma’s funeral. It’s just me and Mel now.’
The group is called S6 Swifts, as they look after swifts in the S6 area of Sheffield. They’re not an official charity, they’re a small voluntary group, but there’s still a lot of time-consuming administrative work.
Considering the group has only been going a year, they’ve achieved a lot. They’ve been featured on Look North and BBC Radio Sheffield, and in a report by Now Then magazine. It’s not difficult to see why the plight of the swifts has won hearts and minds. Both my heart and mind are won by Laura, over the course of our thirty-minute conversation — it turns out swifts are pretty cool. They can fly for up to three years without landing. They can eat, sleep and mate in the air; airline pilots have described seeing flocks of them above the clouds, flying in an unconscious state. They haven’t changed much over the last sixty-five million years, so there are parasites that can only live in the unique conditions of their bodies — whole ecosystems propped up by their existence. And their memories are so laser-sharp that they remember the exact location of their nests; if they’re blocked up, they’ll throw themselves against walls/scaffolding/whatever to try and reach it again. Swifts are also the fastest birds in level flight. So they’ve got a lot going on.
But without people like Laura, Emma and Mel, they’d be even closer to extinction.
‘A lot of what I do is on my phone,’ Laura says. ‘I promote swift awareness on our social media accounts and connect with other swift groups. Nowadays, lots of people put tiny cameras in the boxes, so there are loads of photos and videos of baby swifts. Because they have to fly for three years without landing when they leave the nest, they have to strengthen the muscles in their wings, so they do press-ups. There are lots of videos of them working out. My kids just fell about laughing when they saw them.’
But no matter how strong their wings, swifts might not be around for much longer without help. To find out more about Laura and S6 Swifts, you can join the group on Facebook or take a look at the website. Laura has also written this article about how the group was formed and the tragic loss of its third member, Emma.
The Librarian
Natalie Ring is a Teacher Support Advisor at Twinkl. She also runs a free library from a cabinet in her front garden.
‘I started it during the lockdown in August 2020,’ Natalie says. ‘Obviously, at that point, all the libraries were shut. I had some books I wanted to get rid of, so I upcycled an old cabinet and plopped it out on the front lawn. People come and take books, borrow books and bring them back. It’s used by so many people in the community. Quite a lot of older people use it, but I also see children stopping to have a look when they’re on their way home from school. I think it’s quite a novelty for them, a slightly different way of accessing books, so it’s encouraging for those that might not usually be interested.’
People are still donating books, dropping bags of them on her doorstep. The library has been so successful that she started a book club as well. It was virtual during the lockdowns, but the group now meets in person. They joined up with the local library services (she lives in a village called Burbage, between Coventry and Leicester) and became part of the Reading Friends scheme, which was designed specifically to support individuals feeling isolated during the pandemic. Now, there are over 200 members of the Facebook group and they’ve hosted meet-and-greets with authors.
‘It’s very easy-going,’ Natalie says. ‘We had been meeting in the local library, but that was tricky for people to get to as it was in a nearby town, so we ended up choosing one of the lovely pubs we have in the village. We have very low-key meetings — there were about seven or eight of us last time. I’d never met any of them before and it was really lovely. One lady had only moved to the village recently and hadn’t done anything social in that time. She thanked me for holding the meeting, but I told her it was fine, I was doing it because I wanted to read!’
But Book Clubs aren’t always about books. At the last meeting, Natalie says they talked about the book for about fifteen or twenty minutes. The group was there for two hours. Books are about things, and they lead you to think about those things. When you discuss them with other people, you find out what they think about those things and their experiences. It’s a great way to get a tour of someone else’s head.
Natalie’s head sounds like a very interesting place. When she’s not running libraries, supporting communities or working for Twinkl, she volunteers for a charity called Positive About Down Syndrome.
‘The charity gives you the reality of living with a child or a person in your family that has Down syndrome,’ Natalie explains. ‘During my pregnancy, we found out there was a high chance that our baby would have down syndrome and life just seemed to go downhill after that because our baby also had severe levels of fluid on the brain. Medical professionals talk to you in a very negative way and I found that they were pushing me towards a particular outcome. I’m pro-choice but I’m pro-informed choice. The perspective was that you should end a life before anything severe happens. But I kept thinking ‘how do you know that this will happen?’ PADS give you the reality — they’re parents. And being a teacher, having worked with children, you know every child is different, so you never really know how they’re going to present, be or do.’
Natalie continued with her pregnancy and, as we chat over Google Meet, her son Henley is sitting in her lap, playing with her hair.
‘The charity is great,’ she says. ‘They provide all kinds of resources, Makaton courses, courses about developmental needs, speech and language training. It’s all funded through fundraising.’
Natalie’s raised some funds herself. Having received help from them, she decided she needed to give back and joined them as a Regional Maternity Coordinator. This role involves making sure the language medical practitioners use and the resources they provide are positive and informative. In the twenty-one days before World Down Syndrome Day, Natalie did twenty-one activities to raise money for PADS. She did kickboxing, a musical theatre class, crochet, ballet, Pilates, and much more. Many of the clubs, businesses and organisations let her do the activities for free.
‘I told them my story and they shared all the information,’ Natalie says. ‘And then I shared their information back, to say thank you for helping me. Everyone was really supportive.’
Natalie raised over £400 in those twenty-one days. If you’d like to find out more about PADS, you can visit their website or take a look at their Facebook page.
This article brings Twinkl’s Give Back Month to a close. I’ve spoken to eleven people over the course of writing these two blogs. What strikes me about each story is that there’s light and shade — every one of these people is doing something to contribute to a community, an indisputably good thing. And yet, there’s usually some darkness that has prompted them into action, or a circumstance they find unacceptable: a wrong that needs to be righted.
It’s a good way to think about the world, I think. Particularly now, when there seems to be a lot of bleak headlines. Wherever there is a misfortune or sadness, there are usually good people doing good things, for no reason other than it’s the right thing to do. And, over the last month, it’s been my privilege to meet eleven of them.
