Erin Blackmore makes Star Volunteer

We’re proud to announce that Erin Blackmore was awarded a Star Volunteer Award from the Jack Petchey Foundation

Our fantastic volunteer Erin Blackmore was awarded a Star Volunteer Award after a fantastic contribution to our work, in the year we emerged from lockdown.  

Erin has spent 2020-21 mentoring one-to-one and in online zoom sessions, stamping paper cups, sticking words to pizza boxes, writing poetry in chalk, and helping the public to explore and celebrate the work of our young writers during Unexpected Poetry.

Erin told us;  “The Ministry of Stories taught me never to grow out of my imagination and I’m so grateful for that. Creativity will never not matter. It’s been so rewarding to build rapport with individual children and see their ideas and confidence grow. Being trusted like that is so fulfilling.” 

Volunteers are the lifeblood of the Ministry of Stories and we rely on our fantastic network of writing mentors and shopkeepers to help our young people discover the transformative joy of writing. 

Thanks to our young volunteers project Your Time to Shine, funded by the Jack Petchey Foundation, we’ve been able to welcome many new young volunteers into the Ministry of Stories community since 2019. 

Our young volunteers work with us on all sorts of things. For some, that means running the till and packing orders at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies – and welcoming families into the magical world, dreaming up stories behind all of our weird and wonderful products such as Impacted Earwax and Brain Jam. 

Other volunteers work directly with young people as part of our community writing labs.  They support as mentors to bring out the best in young people’s creative writing, or provide editorial support through projects like The Story Engine. 

And there’s been plenty of other work behind the scenes for our young volunteers – from transcribing young people’s work, through to working on big public installations as part of the Unexpected Poetry project. 

For our young volunteers, working with us has opened more doors than just the secret one in Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. Charlotte Cromie has gone from young volunteer with Ministry of Stories through to fully-fledged freelance Writing Facilitator.  And many more volunteers have picked up key skills that have helped them through their next career steps. 

We’re so grateful to all of our volunteers for the incredible help and support they offer. We wouldn’t be able to change the lives of young people without them. If you’d like to help us make a difference to the lives of young people through our volunteering scheme, you can get involved today. 

We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the Jack Petchey Foundation for funding Your Time to Shine for the past two years. We are now seeking a new partner to support our volunteering programme during 2022. Please contact kirsty@ministryofstories.org if you, your company or your foundation are interested in getting involved with this vital and high impact programme.