Flinders New Venture Institute’s Venture Dorm is already well known among South Australia’s business community, but a new blog is for the first time providing intimate details of the daily trials and tribulations of the scheme’s participants.

The Lend a Skilled Hand team, who are currently going through the program, have been making weekly posts about their experiences, providing a valuable insight into the benefits and challenges of the process for other would-be participants.

Lend a Skilled Hand is a not-for-profit organisation based in South Australia, who want to learn how to turn their dream of revolutionising the way people volunteer into a reality through Venture Dorm.

They say they do this by connecting skilled volunteers with opportunities which are much more challenging than serving soup or shaking collection tins.

Sami Peachey, from Lend a Skilled Hand, said that posting each week on the blog was a great opportunity to share their progress with the wider community, and that knowing their posts were being read by the general public provided an added incentive to work even harder to achieve their goals.

“Writing a blog post each week on our progress allows the team to reflect on what we’ve achieved, and what we need to continue working on,” Ms Peachey said.

“It’s a great way to benchmark your progress and it gets feedback from a variety of people.

“Often the feedback we receive from the mentors and other teams is valuable not only to us, but also to everyone else who is interested in starting a business.”

“Having an idea and passion behind it is not the same as having a good business, so the input we get from Venture Dorm each week, and the collaborative environment it offers, enables us to turn our ideas and passion into something tangible.”