Volunteers' Week: Michelle – volunteering in Wrexham
Volunteers’ Week runs from 1-7 June. To mark the week, Get Out Get Active (GOGA) is celebrating volunteers’ positive impact on the programme. Michelle Davies lives in Wrexham, Wales, and first got involved in GOGA sessions as a participant of the couch to 5k sessions with GOGA Wrexham.
Michelle initially heard about the GOGA sessions online and joined as a beginner at Queensway and her journey started from there. Over the next few weeks Michelle successfully completed the 0- 5k course and was offered the opportunity to attend a Run Leaders qualification with Welsh Athletics.
The Run Leaders course is a one-day practical course is delivered around 100 times per year up and down the country. The course looks at the essential health and safety for leading a group run, how to structure running sessions appropriate to the level of your runners (including warm-ups, cool-downs and stretches), and how to plan suitable routes.
Michelle is now able to lead her own running groups and continues to do so in her community.
Michelle had been attending the GOGA sessions for nearly a year as a participant. Throughout this time she was inspired and began telling friends, family, colleagues and people in her area about the sessions to spread the word of GOGA.
Michelle said:
Since starting, I have loved running and so being able to spread that to other people is a great thing to do as well as it being a new challenge. I love helping and assisting people to enjoy running as much as me. My daughter Maisie who now attends the GOGA running sessions with me. We’re a team and it has been great to attend the session together but also to spread the word of GOGA through the Wrexham community. I have found that volunteering is extremely rewarding and if you’re volunteering at something you enjoy then it’s even better. So I would tell anyone to just get out and give it a go