A guest blog by Thomas Armitage
A number of Duke of Edinburgh students have now chosen Slow The Flow for their volunteering element – congratulations to them all! We love welcoming them and their families back after they finish, and look forward to the next years’ cohort.
Thomas Armitage reminisces about his experience below:
To complete my Gold Duke of Edinburgh experience, I had to volunteer for 12 months for at least one hour a week. I’d heard about Slow The Flow from one of my relatives who used to live in the Calder Valley near Hebden Bridge and knew anyone could volunteer to help with them. My dad also knew about them and so I looked at what they did. I was passionate about Slow The Flow’s mission as flood risk is a major issue in the area where I am from and has massively impacted people’s lives in recent years, so I wanted to be able to do my part to help reduce the impact.
When I went to my first Slow The Flow session, everyone was more than welcome to me and my dad, and helped us throughout the session as we got to grips with what we did in the session. There were people that had been there since it started and people who had recently joined like me, but everyone was treated the same. All are given the same opportunities in the session to try all the different jobs; in leaky dam building, that’s carrying and placing logs, sawing and lopping, and stuffing the gaps.
It is important that younger people get involved in volunteering like the Slow The Flow and similar activities to make sure that progress that’s already been made is continued in the future and hopefully flood risk and the impact it has is in the Calder Valley is reduced significantly.
I volunteered with Slow The Flow for just over a year and felt it was a great choice to do for my Duke of Edinburgh as I was able to volunteer and be able to make a visible impact in my local community at the same time, this is why I would recommend volunteering for Slow The Flow to anyone in Calderdale, especially people looking to do it for their Duke of Edinburgh.