Volunteers Week 2022: Nina's story

I’ve been volunteering as a running coach in Shoreham for around four months. I wanted to help others by sharing my knowledge and love for running. For me personally, running has been a great coping mechanism for my own mental health and is helping me after the loss of my Dad – and I knew that it could help others.

I love seeing the difference we can make to someone's day, week and life through the weekly running sessions. We have seen amazing changes in confidence, communication, happiness, health, fitness, as well as incredible changes in body language too.

People who get support with West Sussex Mind are very grateful to us for what we do, which is very special. We have adapted the sessions to suit the group’s needs and people are enjoying meeting up and running together. We get feedback from them each week and the runners have a WhatsApp group to communicate and encourage each other between sessions.

I got great support from West Sussex Mind before volunteering to work with their service users. We had a group meeting for the volunteer run coaches and got to meet each other and pair up ready for the sessions.

We had quite a lot of information to go through together and there were some online courses that we had to complete prior to starting the sessions – to help us understand and be prepared for what we might experience within our groups. And now that the running groups are active, we meet up every two to three months to feedback and discuss any issues.

I volunteer for around four hours each week with the Shoreham running group. This includes travel to and from our meeting point, the session itself and a post-session coffee and chat with the group. The run leaders also spend time talking about and planning the groups, which is usually one evening.

I absolutely love being part of this – meeting, helping and inspiring other people. Seeing them take that first step and develop and grow is incredibly humbling. And I feel very lucky to be doing what I love.