< Volunteer Archives – Page 2 of 2 – Mamie Martin Fund

Tag: Volunteer

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Why be a Mamie Martin Fund Trustee?

MMF’s Co-convenor shares some ideas about trusteeship of our little organisation, with thanks to all those who contributed to this list.

  1. Educating and empowering girls helps to save the planet. See BBC Radio 4 – 39 Ways to Save the Planet, Educating and Empowering Girls
  2. The Scotland -Malawi and Malawi-Scotland relationship is strong and well supported by our governments. As a Trustee you will be playing your part in a lively and vibrant country to country partnership 
  3. We are a working Board, so you will have the opportunity to use your existing skills and experience as well as learning new skills
  4. We use digital resources to work and communicate as efficiently as possible and to save time
  5. Your work will be interesting, you will learn a lot and will never be bored
  6. You will never be short of conversation topics, or material for interviews and applications
  7. You will give your time and energy, but you will know that you are helping to make a difference. See Number 1 above.

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Give a little regularly – make a big difference: Margaret Coutts’ story

Margaret is in her 80s, and (in her words) will talk to anybody. Mariot from MMF met her today in a café for a cup of tea to talk about why she donates £10.00 a month to the Mamie Martin Fund. The meeting today had to be fixed around her other commitments, as she is a volunteer with various local groups and has a busy diary. Margaret donates regularly to three charities working in Malawi: Mary’s Meals, the Raven Trust and Mamie Martin Fund.

She visited Malawi as part of a small group from local churches in 2003 and describes it as a ‘life-changing experience’. She loved meeting and talking with Malawian people but was aware of the extreme poverty and the hardship in many people’s lives. The group visited some schools and Margaret remembers seeing good teaching and enthusiastic learning, in very basic accommodation with minimal resources. They also saw Mary’s Meals at work, providing food for school children.

Margaret came home from Malawi determined to support the organisations working to alleviate poverty and inequality. When she found out that the rebuilding of four Falkirk schools meant that the furniture and equipment from the old buildings was heading to the skip, she had the idea of sending that school furniture to Malawi instead.  Thanks to the support she got from the Raven Trust and local churches, children in Malawi are now using desks & chairs all the way from Falkirk.

She is great fun to talk to and there was a lot of laughter in our chat today. Margaret was in Brownies and Guides in her young days and still attends the Trefoil Guild. She encourages young people today to join youth organisations and sees it as a great way to make friends and learn new skills. Perhaps that helped to develop her zest for life and strong sense of service. In her sixties she sat and passed her Advanced Driving Test.

In summary, Margaret says ‘I’m passionate about education for girls. It opens up their lives and their futures.’

Mariot’s meeting with Margaret Coutts, 3 August 2021

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Our volunteer web ‘master’

Introducing another of our band of volunteers, Jean Gordon, who is a social worker, researcher and educator and lives on the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. Her interest in education, and especially girls’ education, dates back from two very formative years in her ’20s teaching at a secondary school on a small island in Fiji.

As a social worker, and now university tutor and researcher, in the Scottish Highlands, Jean is particularly aware of the challenges of accessing education in rural areas. She’s been involved with the Mamie Martin Fund for about five years, first as a trustee, and now helping to look after the MMF website.

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Video volunteer making a difference

We’ve been taking videos and trying to get better at providing you, our supporters and friends, with reasonable quality footage of our work in Malawi. Apart from Doreen, our Administrator and Bookkeeper in Scotland and Mercy, our Malawi Manager, we are all volunteers and learning as we go. Imagine our pleasure, then, to get an offer of help with our video editing, particularly the sound which is so challenging when filming in Malawi (you wouldn’t believe the level of background noise everywhere!). 

Richard Robinson is now our Video Volunteer and his work can be see in the two most recent videos we’ve published – a story about Benadeta and one about the Thompson Girls. Richard’s background is in rural development and the environment. Recently he has been involved in local Scottish community projects addressing climate change, which led him to learn basic video-editing skills. His daughter’s school have a long established partnership with a school in Southern Malawi; she visited as a teenager and the family later hosted an exchange student. This led Richard to become very aware of the difficulties of education in Malawi, particularly for girls.

We are hugely grateful for this help. As those of you who have done any video-editing will know, it is a very time-consuming task and can be very frustrating. But you can look forward to better-quality videos now that we have Richard on board!

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A fresh perspective

Kathleen Sargeant was part of the Falkirk High School visit to Malawi in 2008, when the group attended class at Bandawe Girls Secondary School for a week. The trip made a big impression on all the pupils and teachers, which included Mariot Dallas, currently co-convenor of MMF. 

Kathleen now works in a marketing role in London and has been enormously helpful in reviewing our website and suggesting improvements. Following a meeting in London recently, she was persuaded to extend her volunteering to managing a digital skills audit of MMF, which is part of our Action Plan following our recent Strategic Review. 

It’s hugely helpful to have volunteers taking on specific tasks like this, as we reported recently in relation to the sorting-out-images task that Sue Dumbleton is doing for us. It is also greatly appreciated when we have the input of young people like Kathleen. The average age of our Board is, like most NGOs in Scotland, much higher than we would like, given that we are in the business of education for girls. New perspectives are always helpful and input from younger people is especially welcome.

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New volunteer on board

We are delighted that volunteer, Sue Dumbleton, has agreed to help us out with our images, which proliferate faster than we can edit and file them. Sue’s own photos are great and you can check that out on her Blipfoto blog, where she posts photos and ‘blips’ as ‘Tweedy’. Images are so important in our work but finding the time to get them into a sensible filing system and tidy them up is a challenge to the Trustees. 

Sue is committed to education, particularly to girls’ education and has been a supporter of the Mamie Martin Fund for some time. You might have seen our post-AGM news item which was taken from Sue’s own blog about the event. 

We are really appreciative of our volunteers’ time and commitment. Those contributions help us to keep the organization working efficiently and, we hope, effectively. If you have a skill that you’d like to offer us, please do get in touch at [email protected]