Mariana Rossi: "Volunteering is an opportunity to give my contribution to the world".
It was in Sunday school that it all began: "When I started to help teach Sunday school, I started volunteering without really realising that I was doing it," says Mariana Rossi. The student of the Masters in Psychology of the Faculdade de Educação e Psicologia (Faculty of Education and Psychology) of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Porto, started her voluntary work at 14 years old.
Today, aged 21, she takes part in three different voluntary groups and has never stopped teaching Sunday school. But it was when she entered university that she got to know different causes and different realities.
In the first year of her degree in Psychology, she got to know CASO – Católica Solidária, the Porto Regional Centre's volunteer group, and signed up. Three years later, she is one of the students responsible for her own group of volunteers.
"I always try to convince everyone to do voluntary work", she confesses happily. To young people, she asks "not to be afraid, nor to think that they are not capable", and even if they think that volunteering is not for them, "to try it, because for sure they will succeed in "touching at least one person".
Mariana has already managed to touch many people with her work. Through the University, she started this journey in the association O Meu Lugar No Mundo, which promotes the education of vulnerable children and young people. In this association, she helped a child with their studies and homework. This dedication did not prevent her from taking part in other projects, such as GAS'África, which involves nine months of training and a field mission.
"The training helped me to understand who I was and how I was with other people, it gave me tools to better serve the people I work with," she says. But it was during the five-week mission in the Algarve that "everything made sense" for the young volunteer.
"I didn't want to leave, I felt that my mission was to do what I was doing there," she reveals. In the Algarve, she had the opportunity to meet different people and realities. "I worked in Roma camps, shelters, with refugees..." The diversity she encountered was "very encouraging and a learning experience", she explains. "I realised that if I have the willpower and am available, I always have something to give to people, no matter who they are. And I feel that they have given me much more than what I may have given them."
These volunteering experiences contributed not only to her personal development, but also to her choice of Master in Psychology with specialization in Education and Human Development. "With volunteering, the course was making more sense and was becoming more meaningful," explains the student. "I realised that my way of helping others was not so much in an office, as a clinical psychologist, but on the ground, within a community."
For Mariana, volunteering is "opportunity". An opportunity to learn, about ourselves and about the world, but above all: "It's an opportunity for me to give my contribution to the world, to leave a mark on the world and on the people in it".