00:00Obviously, it's a big change from a city to a regional town, so I try to find things to keep
00:06me busy, and one of these things was volunteering.
00:09When Santiago Suarez moved from Sydney to Wagga with his family four years ago, he chose to volunteer with Vinny's
00:16to get involved in his community.
00:18Volunteering was a good option for me, since I didn't have many friends, I didn't know anyone in Wagga.
00:25In his volunteer role at the retail charity store, Mr Suarez learned about the unique challenges refugees experience in regional
00:34Australia.
00:35In Sydney, I didn't interact, I didn't have many interactions with refugees, but here, obviously, because it's a regional town,
00:43it's a smaller place, you can see more refugees and you can see the struggles and what non-profits like
00:50Vinny's do to help them, and I found that really interesting.
00:57Getting out and being able to talk to the members of the public, it really does promote a confidence that
01:07is otherwise harder to educate.
01:11Volunteers are also the backbone of regional communities when disasters strike.
01:17From the age of 16, people can volunteer with the New South Wales State Emergency Service to help their communities
01:25in crises like floods and storms.
01:28Volunteers are the next generation, and they're the people that are going to take on the mantle of learning these
01:35very difficult and tricky skill sets, and those young people are what's going to encourage us to educate the future
01:47volunteers to be able to complete the tasks that we do.
01:51And they're the people who go on if they work on the minds of the people they aren't going to
01:56get here too.
01:56You
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