Meet Karen from Otago

For Karen, volunteering began with a pair of football boots and a younger brother who couldn't quite keep up.

"My little brother kept getting left out of the weekend games at our local park because nobody had the patience to teach the younger kids. So I started running drills for them on Saturday mornings. It wasn't coaching, really. It was just making sure no one got left on the sideline."

What started as a few neighbourhood kids soon grew into a regular crew of more than twenty. Karen saw how something as simple as showing up each week could give a kid a reason to belong, and it led him to find SVA.

With SVA, he logged more than 560 volunteer hours, during which he discovered opportunities he'd never expected, from beach clean-ups along the Auckland coast to packing food parcels during the winter appeal. He came to believe that "showing up is half the work," and he saw how that idea could stretch far beyond a football field.

Then he founded and led initiatives at Westlake Boys High School, including a peer-tutoring programme and a junior mentoring scheme.

"It wasn't just about me helping the younger guys with their maths. It was about building something where the seniors I trained could turn around and mentor the year nines themselves, so the support kept going even after I left."

And Karen didn't stop there. He helped organise his school's largest-ever charity fundraiser, volunteered as a sign-language buddy for students with additional needs, and now guides younger students as a prefect.

Through SVA, he realised that "the smallest acts done consistently are what actually change a community, not the big one-off gestures everyone remembers."