City Year UK volunteer Holly O’Shea, from Selly Oak, Birmingham, has been awarded one of the first Domino’s ODEs - Order of the Domino’s Empire - in recognition of her charity work.
Loughborough University student Holly, 20, will now receive free pizza from Domino’s for a year after being nominated for the award by her boyfriend Jonah.
Holly is spending her placement year volunteering full-time with City Year UK at Bristnall Hall Academy in Oldbury, where she serves as a mentor and role model to pupils as part of a team.
As part of Bristnall Hall’s inaugural Lighthouse Team, Holly serves as a peer mentor to the pupils, being a part of their school day from breakfast club to homework club. As well as taking a whole school approach, each member of the team has a focus list of pupils who particularly benefit from extra support, which could be related to attendance, behaviour or curriculum results.
City Year UK is a youth social action charity which believes that through a year of full-time volunteering, 18 to 25-year-olds can make a real difference to the life chances of school pupils from the most disadvantaged communities, whilst gaining valuable leadership experience and boosting their own career prospects.
Holly said: “Winning this award was honestly such an amazing surprise! Helping people already comes with so much satisfaction and to receive this recognition on top of that is really just an incredible extra.”
As well as giving her time to volunteer with City Year, Holly was also the youngest ever athlete to compete in the Dubai Ironman Challenge to raise money for Palestinian refugees and spent a summer teaching children in Uganda how to read and write. Whilst at university at Loughborough she ran campaigns to support the LGBT community.
Each recipient was presented with the pizza-shaped ODE medal and will receive free, freshly made Domino’s pizza for a year. Only a limited number of people are being awarded the honour each year, based on nominations from the public via Domino’s UK Facebook page.
