I’m 29 and I work for a charity called Headway. I currently co-manage a Read Together project, which brings reading to people recovering from brain injuries or strokes. Many of the people we support are on the fringes of society and can’t access the pleasure reading can bring.
I started off volunteering for Headway as I had a degree in psychology and it was fascinating seeing in practice what I had learnt in the classroom. Headway is the step between leaving hospital and returning to normality. We help people regain their independence and for many of the people who come to our centre it is their only activity.
Before joining Headway I didn’t realise the extent to which brain injury affects people’s lives. It is often called a hidden disability: people with brain injuries don’t have a walking stick or crutch. Some of our volunteers have had brain injuries themselves and are valuable contributors to our work.
The Guardian is definitely one of the fairer papers and has much less bias than other newspapers. It is nice to read a paper that doesn’t focus on celebrity gossip and succumb to the same temptation of trolling other people’s lives.
I am a big fan of the travel section and also admire the coverage of mental health. There is a big issue with mental health in Britain at present – the NHS is wonderful when you have a broken leg but it is a different story when you have a mental issue and it is great to see a newspaper that engages with this.
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