Lucas Farrell shares his experiences teaching our volunteers to access technology - and learning a few things himself along the way.
I think we can all agree that it’s easy to feel left behind sometimes when it comes to technology. We think we’re relevant, until a 4-year-old or a teenager in our life teaches us something we didn’t know, followed by “it’s easy” and an eye roll.
At Rise, inclusivity is one of our core values and we strive to ensure it extends to all parts of the organisation. In order to align with our commitment to privacy, security and a greener future, we’ve given all volunteers a Rise email address and access to the web-based version of Microsoft Office 365 suite and the Rise Intranet.
These measures have been introduced to provide a more secure way to communicate with our volunteers and to reduce the amount of paper handling, as we move closer to a paperless world.
I am privileged to have been tasked with the roll-out and introduction of this new initiative to Rise Volunteers and am very proud to see the volunteers embracing this new process.
Enter Marie Zogbi.
Marie volunteers 3 days a week and has done for many years at the Warwick Arts Hub. Marie had more than a few trepidations and some anxiety about sitting in front of a computer, using a mouse which she had never used before, logging-on and finding the web browser, navigating to webmail and entering a username and password, and on top of all that, having to create a password that a had a lot of pedantic requirements. 12 Charact3rs including one capital, a number and a special character. We eventually found something that worked and that she hopefully wouldn’t forget, and she was relieved to know that we’re all guilty of regularly forgetting our passwords and having to reset them.
I am personally inspired by her enthusiasm and willingness to adapt to something new that seemed so foreign at first and am looking forward to meeting more volunteers who will no doubt teach me far more than I can teach them.
Lucas Farrell
Administration Support - Aged Care
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