How Jenny Upgraded Her Volunteering Journey Through Her 1st Mentoring Experience | Time Auction Impact Highlights
Meet Jenny!
Jenny founded Anorak, a brand of travel accessories and lifestyle products, that encourages individuality and positive thinking. Apart from hard skills like product design, Jenny has also strengthened her skillsets with abundant entrepreneurial experiences throughout the years, such as team management and business operation. By recommendation of a friend, she decided to embark on the journey with Time Auction!
"From delivering rice bags to becoming a mentor, my volunteering journey has been upgraded alongside my personal growth!"
In the past, only high school memories would spring into Jenny's mind while talking about volunteerism. Yet, she always wished to further devote herself into generating a positive impact for society. After learning more about Time Auction, Jenny instantly registered to be our skilled-volunteer and was quickly matched with DreamStarter to be their DreamBacker. As a DreamBacker, she supported students on their passion projects by offering them advices and resources.
From involving in hands-on volunteer work as a teen to becoming a "DreamBacker" for other teens, Jenny feels like her volunteering journey is transformational and have progressed into the next level. With the help of detailed guidelines, Jenny executed the role smoothly, utilising her design expertise to provide students with constructive feedback.
"It was a rewarding experience to donate my skill set while polishing it simultaneously."
There was an initial concern she couldn't shake off before the day of her volunteering with DreamBacker — She had little to no experience in mentoring others! Determined not to let her mindset limit the potential of what she can achieve, she reminded herself that life is all about trial and error, and first time for everything is always the most challenging (fake it till you make it, eh?). Recentering herself, she dived into this volunteering experience with confidence and have discovered her newborn mentoring skills with the encouragement from DreamStarter.
A Leap of Faith Led to Astonishing Achievements and Rewards
What Jenny didn't expect is that the most precious reward would be gifted by her mentees. She was truly amazed by all the innovative ideas proposed by them. Being an introspective individual, she realised that in contrast to her young and creative mentees, she rarely thinks out of the box as an adult. She was restricting herself as she was bogged down by finances and other calculations or concerns, and progressively put a halt in exercising her creative muscles. This experience was a wake up call on summoning her creative senses again to facilitate her in continuing to pioneer innovation.
"Volunteering extends beyond philanthropy as it entails an exciting journey of exploring a variety of jobs, learning to work with new teams while gaining unique insights!"
Jenny now maximizes the value of each volunteering opportunity as a chance to engage with new parties, expanding her network and to learn from individuals from different industries. It is crucial for to make it a habit to push ourselves out of our comfort zones frequently. Who knows? You may be able to reach new horizons and perform above your expectations!
Jenny offers her words of encouragement to people who are scared of committing to new volunteer projects — there will always be a project which suits your availability, matches your skill sets and sparks your interests! Just take your first step now — Your leap of faith could create an impact that you’ve never expected, and could even generate a ripple effect to encourage more individuals to volunteer!
Thank you so much to Jenny for contributing 4 volunteer hours and more to come!
To be featured as our community member, embark on your volunteering journey by discovering projects you can help with now: http://www.timeauction.org/projects
Interviewed & written by Haley Yu
