Fundraising Development Officer
Belfast Youth Initiatives

Stephanie K

00:02 OK my name is Stephanie K and I’m a fundraising development officer.

00:08 It basically involves sort of management of the whole financial side everything, recording all the financials as well as actually trying to get the money in the first place, making applications for funding and things like that, then tracking all funding that we’ve managed to get. I went to St Dominic’s in the Falls Road so a general pass as you do, GCSE you do your A levels and then you go on to university. That’s the path that most people would take, the path that most people did take from this school as well, so I you know you take you GCSEs and moved on to do my A levels, I did enjoy school and everything as well. I studied I did four A levels in politics, religion, history and English.

00:51 Religion was my favourite subject at school it was sort of more interesting and topical than the other things we, religion is, a lot of people think oh you’re just learning about the bible and stuff but it’s not, half of your entire level’s actually on ethics, and it’s something that I found very interesting.

01:08 I went in to Queens and studied law for a year, but found that I didn’t actually like law so then I was taking a year out, and I just lived on site at University and I moved home which isn’t far from here and happened to see this job advertised and I applied and got it and then turned out that, by chance this is what actually turned out to enjoy doing so I’ve stuck with it now for a couple of years.

01:32 You can move in to a lot of professions after many, many years of training and earn a lot more but is your job satisfaction, how comfortable you feel in the job as well you know it’s comfortable, you feel like you’re actually helping people and things like that and if you’re not happy to go to work every day then, it’s extremely difficult for you to get up and go to work every day so I think it’s probably the most important thing in any job that you’re doing that you’re actually happy doing it.

01:57 Realising that I didn’t actually enjoy studying law and seeing that if I didn’t enjoy studying it and learning about it I wasn’t ever going to enjoy practicing it every day from eight o’clock in the morning to eight o’clock at night.

02:08 It’s OK to be unsure I don’t think it’s possible to actually know what you want to do until you’ve had a go at doing it, so I wouldn’t say, don’t throw yourself into one particular career option because before you know you might have put everything but you’ll be going the whole way through school the whole way through A levels GCSEs and everything and geared towards one career but you might decided doing that and realise I don’t want to do it, I don’t like this at all so keep your options open.

02:35 I doubt whenever I first started the job I intended on sort of doing it and then moving back into my second year of law, after I’d worked did the job for a while and I’d earned some money and stuff ?? I was working here I saw the opportunity to sort of furthering yourself and I actually started as well to study part time and I do at the minute for my diploma in counselling through university of Ulster so I’m doing that in the background.

03:01 My dad trains train drivers he used to be a train driver himself and now he provides training for people to become train drivers so not really very similar at all and my mum is a volunteer counsellor in the area. So I suppose she was a bit more involved in the aspect of work that I do than what my dad would be with the person I work actually offered her a lot of mediation and counselling services.

03:27 I’d done a lot of volunteer work on things like this in the past and done charity work I’ve even if I was at school I ventured off to India to sort of help out with a charity and build a school and things like that so it’s something that I always enjoyed it’s not like I left university and all of a sudden completely changed and geared towards the community sector, it wasn’t anything like that it was just sort of a gradual process and, getting used to things and getting to know the sector itself better.

03:53 END