Meet the Hidden Heroes
KERAMI – SCOPE
We are delighted to share with you a very special ‘Meet the Hidden Heroes’ story. Kerami is a fantastic Hidden Hero from SCOPE. Her story encapsulates everything that Room to Reward is about, and we are extremely privileged and grateful to be able to share it with you.
Nominee: Kerami
Nominating Charity: SCOPE
Hotel Break: The Ham Yard Hotel
Where better to start than a few words from Kerami herself about her volunteering journey and what being part of the SCOPE team means to her:
Kerami was nominated as part of the Outstanding Volunteer of the Year campaign we ran in December 2017. The below extracts from her nomination are just a flavour of the gratitude SCOPE expressed for the difference she makes.
In January 2017, Kerami became one of fifteen Online Community Champion volunteers who make our online disability forum possible. Since then, she has given so much to our charity and helped us lots of ways, as well as directly supporting disabled people on the forum. Behind the scenes, Kerami is making a difference by offering support, information resources and sharing her own personal experience of disability with other forum members in the hope of helping someone with their problems.
Kerami plays an important role in bringing together a community of people connected by disability. She takes the time to start lots of discussions in an attempt to increase interaction on the Online Community which helps Scope to be able to offer a better support service to disabled people and their families. Throughout her posts and responses to others’ posts, Kerami has proven herself to be a caring and compassionate person who sensitively and helpfully supports others.
Kerami uses her experiences as a disabled parent to help other families. An example of this was when she started a thread specifically for disabled parents to talk about the joys and difficulties of being a parent with an impairment. Further to this, Kerami has made others who experience chronic pain feel able to share hints and tips about pain management by starting a forum thread titled “a cheerful thread about chronic pain” in which she encourages others to share their difficult experiences in a positive way. She did this as she recognised that lots of people were suffering and she wanted to give them a space to speak freely about their impairment. It is little things like this that can actually make a really big impact on disabled people’s lives when someone is able to find support, comfort and information that helps them.
On top of all this, Kerami has gone above and beyond in her volunteer role by helping with other areas of Scope’s work. For example, she has recently supported staff by making a video to be shown at an event showcasing Scope’s breadth of services supporting disabled people and their families so that greater awareness can be raised about the Online Community. She also featured in Volunteer News which involved taking the time to write down her personal volunteering story, her reflections on what the role is like, and her tips for other volunteers about balancing your volunteering with your own personal well-being and mental health. In the article, Kerami also shared that she’s disabled herself and talked about the positive impact that volunteering has had on her life and how it helps as a distraction from pain. Kerami’s volunteer story now features on our website, so it could be read by others who are disabled and inspire them to consider volunteering with Scope in future, thanks to the candid way in which she shared her experiences of being a disabled volunteer.
The fact that Kerami has been so willing and enthusiastic when approached about supporting other areas of Scope’s work means that she’s made an exceptional contribution for a volunteer who is still relatively new to our organisation as this is her first year with us, and we’ve been both surprised and grateful for her passion for helping others in a similar situation to herself.
In just a short space of time, she’s become invaluable and added so much to the quality of the Online Community, helping to create a stronger, richer community of people sharing experiences and supporting one another. She is a true asset to the team, a lovely person to work with and we are so proud to nominate her as a great big thank you for everything that she has done for Scope’s Online Community, for disabled people, and for our charity as a whole.
Kerami’s story and nomination had a big impact in the R2R office. It was an obvious, instant ‘yes’ and a real pleasure to use our initiative to recognise someone who has contributed so much.
The Outstanding Volunteer initiative was supported by some fabulous hotels and we were delighted to book Kerami and family into the stunning Ham Yard Hotel for two nights in August. Not only was this well-earned ‘thank you’ for Kerami, it also enabled some very special birthday celebrations.
“I had the pleasure of meeting Kerami, and to see the impact that a short break in what for us would have been an unsold room had on her and her family really brought home to me what a simple, easy and important thing Room to Reward is for hoteliers to be involved with.”
Laura Sharpe – General Manager, Ham Yard Hotel
“We are having a fabulous time at the Ham Yard! We arrived after a stunning day at Harry Potter Studios to a beautiful room. We are enjoying our buffet breakfast in our room which is just divine… Emily is enjoying her birthday bath in the most beautiful bath and bathroom I’ve ever seen. We are so, so relaxed! Just wanted to let you know all was going fantastic, off out to explore London…. many many thanks again!”
Kerami – SCOPE Hidden Hero
If we could invent a story to sell R2R, we couldn’t come up with something that captures what our charity is about so perfectly. With that in mind, we’ll leave the final word to Kerami to describe how she felt when she found out about the nomination and what the break meant to her.
R2R would like to thank SCOPE and Kerami for their help in sharing this fantastic story, and the Ham Yard Hotel for their wonderful support.