Callum Jones is a Meningitis Now Young Ambassador and has just joined our Believe & Achieve Peer Mentor scheme.
Twenty-year-old Callum, whose sister Erin contracted bacterial meningitis when she was eight-years-old, told us how much he was looking forward to being a peer mentor:
“Peer Mentoring is something I have been looking forward to for a couple of months. We had the Believe & Achieve training day at the start of summer, ever since then I’ve felt ready to mentor someone and hopefully make a positive difference by being a safe person they feel comfortable to talk to, by being someone they feel confident confiding anything they’re finding challenging and someone they recognise is there to listen to them."
“I understand the importance of mentoring as recently I’ve gone through quite a big change in my life. I left my job and made the decision to set up my own business. I felt that this was a big change and a change that I needed lots of support through. Luckily, I had two or three Mentors that I could bounce ideas off and talk through what I’m finding challenging about setting up a business. What also helped me was being able to switch off from business and talk about everything else that was going on in my life such as cricket, football and where I’m going on holiday."
“The whole mentoring process was beneficial as it was a time where I had second thoughts about whether I’d made the right decision, I was unsure if I was setting my business up in the right way to be successful. Having mentors in place allowed me to talk about how I was feeling at this time rather than struggle on my own. From a practical point of view there was also a fear of my business having no work. The reassurance and the planning from my mentors was invaluable in making me feel at ease and realising that I had done the right thing, it’s just that it would take time to get that first piece of work."
“This is what I want to give back and be able to do. I want to support my Mentee like I have been supported, I want to put to good use all the skills I learnt from the training day. I feel that being a mentor is an important role that can really make a difference.”