International Women's Day: Jean Gailey on engaging in the world of those we serve

Jean Gailey's experience in COVID meant she was suddenly isolated from the young women she served during lockdown, and needed to adapt quickly. Listen as Jean shares the importance of connection, whole-person support and letting others know, 'I'm still here for them'.

We invite you to download and share this and our other International Women's Day testimonies with your community (link below). The following is a transcript from the video:

Hi everyone, my name is Jean and I am a youth worker for The Salvation Army.

I'm very blessed with the job I have to be able to speak into young women's lives so I've just been doing that during the COVID-19 times. Just engaging in their world a bit more, through social media with the lockdown - and then once we've been able to get out of lockdown we’ve made the most of catching up face-to-face through a walk or sharing a meal and just sharing each other's experiences.

Some of them have told me that they've loved the online school, some of them don’t - so just getting to know them a bit more, to be able to build that trust a bit more and to let them know that I'm still there for them.
And also being able to extend that help to their family for the sake of the young person’s overall well-being - just to help in any way that I can, through our other services like Foodbank for example.

Also, trying to get the young people to be hopeful that they will get out of this. Just hopeful in general - like writing a letter to their future-self a year from now, something as little as that.

So yeah, that's just me. Thank you

We're celebrating International Women's Day by sharing women's testimonies of leadership during COVID in New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa Territory. We will be releasing new videos daily, and joining a worldwide video montage on The Salvation Army International Social Justice Commission's Facebook Page on March 8th. We invite you to share and view these stories with your community, to amplify their voices!

• CHECK OUT the other Salvationist Stories here (updated daily)
• VIEW the videos on Youtube (captions available)
• VIEW and SHARE from our Facebook Page
• DOWNLOAD the video files from OneDrive