Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 8
“I never thought I would be able to do this stuff—but I can. Anyone can wear the mask.” This is what Miles Morales, a 16-year-old Spiderman, says in the movie Into the Spider-Verse. In it, the original Spiderman, Peter Parker, becomes his mentor not only for his abilities but also for his compassion toward others.
(You can view this part of the movie at the bottom of our post HERE. You too can wear the mask!)
We also find that volunteering offers an excellent milieu for mentoring others, as we find out in this week’s episode, centred on the Community Kitchen (a close partner of Serve the City Brussels). These mentees may be young people, as is the case with Aline. She is now the CK Operations Manager, but was formerly a teenage volunteer who did Serve the City projects with her youth group. Or they may be people in vulnerable situations, who find support as they engage in volunteering… and perhaps also find a new future waiting for them!
We also explore the risks and benefits of this kind of mentoring in discussion with Gayl Russell, the Community Kitchen founder, and Rev. Annie Bolger, chaplain at Holy Trinity Anglican Church where the Community Kitchen operates. You will be inspired in developing and mentoring your own volunteers as you listen!
Listen to the episode here:
Here we see staff from the Community Kitchen taking a well-earned break while out at the Brussels Christmas market together! In front is Aline, the first person we meet in this episode; on the left is Roya, another of our featured interviewees. Completing the group are Anjali and Akkara (who was in our last episode, Partnerships: Activists, Assemble! )
Aline’s journey to working in the social sector began when she was a teenager in a youth group led by Nathan Torrini, now the leader of Serve the City Belgium. Nathan involved the youth group in Serve the City Big Volunteer Days, and also the Big Volunteer Week in the summer. Aline recounted how she got involved in a community garden, painting a social centre, and distributing food on the streets. She also became a leader in the youth group, mentoring other young people into volunteering. She said:
“We tried to to encourage the young people in Brussels to discover that there are a lot of needs in Brussels. Not all the needs are far away from us. I mean, there are needs everywhere in a lot of countries, but also in our city there are a lot of people who just need a small helping hand.”
Later, Aline became an intern with Serve the City Brussels, working with her mentor Nathan. In the picture above, Aline (in green coat) is leading a food outreach project in Louvain-la-Neuve, a city just outside Brussels.
Gradually, Aline found she had a passion and a vocation for working in the social sector. She took a part-time job with Fedasil, the Belgian Federal government body that manages the process for asylum seekers. She started this job when the Ukraine war sent many Ukrainians all over Europe seeking asylum; now, she works primarily with unaccompanied minors, children and teenagers who have come to Belgium alone.
When Aline began looking for a second part-time job in the social sector, she learned through Serve the City of an opening at the Community Kitchen. Now she is Operations Manager at the Community Kitchen, coordinating the volunteers and employees so that they can meet the demands of the project for which they provide meals. And she in turn can impact volunteers that come by helping them understand how they can can offer “a small helping hand.”
We also talked to Roya, who came to Europe ten years ago from Iran. After spending two years in Greece and four years trying to get to England, she was finally caught by the police in Belgium and applied for asylum. However, her application was turned down, and she ended up on the streets for some time.
Eventually, she found help from Oasis, a Serve the City partner that works with people who have been trafficked or exploited, or who are vulnerable to exploitation. They were working with Serve the City in an initiative called “The Trampoline Project” which helped vulnerable women find a way back into employment, mentoring them through training and volunteering. And when they found out she had experience in cooking, they recommended that she volunteer with the Community Kitchen!
We did an episode about this last season, featuring a short interview with Roya! The episode is called, Courage: Dreaming New Dreams in the Big City
If you want to to learn more about Oasis Brussels, you can find more info HERE.
One of Roya’s big goals was to get out of her exploitative living situation into safe housing. The founder of the Community Kitchen, Gayl Russell, offered Roya to come and live in her house. This is taking mentoring to a whole new level! At the time of the interview, Roya had been living with Gayl almost three years. Gayl talked about how welcoming Roya into her home was not a simple decision, but also how it had helped her to grow as she also learned through mentoring and hosting Roya.
In this picture, Gayl and Roya pose with St. Nicholas, played by Mahmoud, another STC project leader who is also a Syrian refugee, in December 2023. They are celebrating because Roya had finally received her papers to live and work in Belgium! The Community Kitchen had testified to her diligent and dependable work as a chef, and she was finally recognized as a member of the Brussels community. And now she was an employee of the Community Kitchen too!
When we did the interview in November 2024, Roya had just signed a contract for her own apartment—a dream of hers for many years. Finally, after 10 years, she is able to start a new life—thanks to the mentoring and support that she received from Gayl and the Community Kitchen team!
And now, the promised movie clip from Into the Spider-Verse. You too can wear the mask!
