I’ve always been interested in health and fitness. Long before training as an HT, I’d taken a college course to become a health and fitness teacher, followed by a degree in Sports and Exercise Science in 2011. What really set me on the HT path was becoming an Ambassador Volunteer for Team London at the 639 Enterprise Centre in Tottenham (August 2012 to December 2013).
While I was at the 639 Enterprise Centre, my volunteer coordinator mentioned interviews for a Bowel Cancer Awareness project with the Tottenham Hotspurs Foundation. I applied, was successful, and worked as a Community Health Ambassador. A colleague there was going to do the HT course and I decided that I’d look into it too. In April 2013 I began volunteering as a Health Champion, which is a local requirement to training as a Health Trainer.
The HT course is a City and Guilds certificate at level 3, and I completed this in November 2013. It brought together much of my earlier experience and knowledge and gave me a very good insight into the role. After the course I continued volunteering and was eventually approached by the health and wellbeing manager at Tottenham Hotspurs Foundation to become a public health advisor in partnership with the NHS.
In this role I drove a decommissioned ambulance to various venues in the Haringey and Enfield community, taking all the machinery and equipment for health checks, testing for cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure and giving general wellbeing advice and information along with signposting to various services.
The volunteering has been invaluable in giving me a huge variety of experiences and allowing me to develop my networking and people skills! I took up my first paid HT role in September 2014.