The Ideal Student Volunteer?

 

In addition, I’d recommend attending our annual Volunteering Fair and applying for recognition for your volunteering hours every year.

There is no such thing as an ‘ideal student volunteer’. Everyone needs to take into consideration the amount of time and energy they can commit to volunteering and make plans accordingly. If you have the time and energy, this is the path I would recommend using our service.

Student Led Volunteering – why settle for less?

I have spent the last couple of years trying to develop our approach to student-led volunteering – with some success stories and some projects that have not come to fruition…yet.

Each student that wants to run a project has to go through a fairly robust process: registering their interest; developing their idea into a five page application; pitching their project to a funding panel at UBS; project management training, project planning and budget setting and attending regular meetings with their project management coach (a UBS employee volunteer).

Sometimes I worry that this asks too much of these students, but the process is beneficial for everyone to go through. Students learn to develop an idea, communicate it to a broad audience and gain advanced project management skills, such as resolving conflict, motivating volunteers and liaising with stakeholders at every level of the project.

When a project doesn’t work, the application process still provides an excellent opportunity to reflect and learn how problems can arise and how to avoid them arising next time.

The satisfaction that students gain from seeing their idea come to life is huge and when their project is successful there are so many winners!

• Direct beneficiaries gain from seeing a need met
• Student volunteers get to participate in something taking place at extremely local level
• Student project leaders gain all sorts of skills, plaudits and satisfaction from seeing their work come to fruition
• Project management coaches get to see their skills leveraged to make a difference in the local community – not just in a financial setting
• The university benefits from an enhanced reputation and positive publicity for its students
• The volunteering service benefits from having a greater range and scale of volunteering opportunities available to its students and hopefully a sustainable project that can outlast any one staff member

All of us benefit from having more confident, skilled young leaders who know how to make a difference. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d prefer to have fewer projects of higher quality go through the programme.

In our volunteers’ shoes

This morning I received an email from an International Politics student who wants to put in an application for an internship in Washington D.C. In two days time. The application form requires the applicant to have completed thirty hours of volunteering by the summer which either “gets them in touch with the grassroots issues of peoples’ lives” or “stretches their leadership experience in new and untested ways”. For the purposes of the application, they only have to list a selection of projects / opportunities which they will choose from.

Firstly, I think this is a really good criterion from the internship providers. What better way for someone to demonstrate that they have a solid understanding of grassroots issues than by ensuring that they have a story and a human face to contextualise that issue? What better way to demonstrate leadership skills than to talk about the circumstances in which they were gained?

A volunteer's shoes, with some grass roots

Secondly, it put me into that student’s shoes. I am speaking to a group of International Politics students next week on how volunteering can help support their career. This very recent case-study provided me with a framework for my talk. Rather than telling students exactly which volunteering opportunity they should undertake to get their perfect career kick-started (exactly what students want to hear, but does such an opportunity, or career, exist?!) or by re-iterating how valuable volunteering can be for employability (exactly what they expect to hear), instead I am able to share my experience and knowledge of our service to help them find an opportunity that is relevant to their field of study.

This is a win for the students concerned, but it’s also a win for me. I’ve spent an enjoyable couple of hours working through how I would approach this challenge. It helped me identify a couple of out of date opportunities, giving me the chance to re-connect with a couple of organisations I hadn’t spoken too in a while and it reminded me of just how powerful our search engine tool is.

I’ll explain my thought process tomorrow!

Managing Expectations…

…is a widely used euphemism for “lowering expectations”. Why don’t we ever manage expectations so that people expect more of us?

We want to manage your expectations of this event…it will be stupendous.