Volunteering - How To Get Involved

How to get involved in volunteering

There’s lots of ways to get involved in volunteering, either on campus or in the wider community. There’s lots of charities and volunteering providers all looking for willing volunteers to lend a hand. With so many opportunities to navigate it can be a little overwhelming if you’re not sure where to start, so we’ve pulled together a range of resources, weblinks, hints and tips to help.

On campus volunteering opportunities pop up all of the time, at the beginning of the academic year we’re always looking for student volunteers to become part of our team to help welcome our new students and help to settle them into University life. In the lead up to Welcome, you will find all of the information on the Students' Union website.

Our Student Voice team empowers you to improve the quality of your course and make a lasting difference to your University experience. For those who would like to champion student views, there’s opportunities for students to become student Academic Representatives.

This year we’ve also created the Staffs 100, a group of students who have volunteered to inform the Union’s work to make sure we’re engaging a balanced and representative pool of views when exploring key issues or ideas, and giving a voice to under-represented groups to make sure University remains accessible. 

This week our volunteer spotlight highlighted opportunities for students to get involved in the Cop Shop and whilst we’re talking about student groups, running your own club or society as a committee volunteer is a great way to build volunteering experience whilst doing something that you really love. It’s really easy for Staffs students to apply to start a new student group and we’d love to hear from you.

Or maybe you'd like to volunteer as a student mentor as part of the Staffs Peer Mentor Scheme.

If you’re looking for volunteering opportunities further afield, we have partnered with DoIt.org to help you to find an opportunity in the area of work and geographical location that you’re looking for, and you’ll find lots of additional help here.

There's a number of other sites which you can use to search for volunteer opportunities, such as Charity Job Search, Reach Volunteering, Volunteering matters or Prospects.

If you’re looking to volunteer in sustainability and conservation, you could find opportunities with:

Shropshire Council outdoor partnerships , The Conservation volunteers , Wildlife Trusts , Keep Britain Tidy, Marine conservation society , Canal & River Trust, or CPRE The Countryside Charity.

If you’d like to volunteer with animals you could find opportunities with:

RSPCA , Dogs Trust , Cats Protection , PDSA

Looking for opportunities in Staffordshire? You could try:

VAST , Stoke on Trent covid19 support Network , Staffordshire County council , Support Staffordshire

Looking for opportunities in Cheshire? You could try:

Cheshire East Council , RSPCA Crewe and Nantwich

Looking for opportunities in London? You could try:

Team London Volunteering , Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Volunteering safely

It goes without saying that both you and your placement provider should ensure that all safety precautions are followed to keep both yourself and others safe whilst you are volunteering. The placement provider has a duty to carry out a thorough risk assessment of the activities that you will be doing and to ensure that all safety measures are put into place. As a volunteer, you have the right to expect to be provided with suitable safety equipment and sanitiser where appropriate and to request to see the risk assessment relating to your area of work. The Volunteering Matters website has further information here about volunteering safely.

You may prefer to volunteer from home and many of the sites listed above have a facility to search for volunteering opportunities that you can do online or via telephone. A few examples are:

Indeed Volunteer from home, Red Cross support line volunteer Help a child to read with Book Mark Reading , Young Minds Shout text service volunteers or Samaritans and Heads Together

Fundraising

The resource links above are just a small sample of the wide range of opportunities available for volunteers but if you still haven’t found anything to spark the passion, you can even create your own volunteer opportunity and get involved in Raise and Give, here you will find more information about charity fundraising, how the Students’ Union can help you and lots of fundraising ideas.

We know that our students are big hearted and that many of you already get involved in fund raising activities. If you do undertake any charity fundraising; whether you’ve braved the shave or run a charity car wash, raised a few hundred or just a few pounds, we’d really love to know about the great charitable work that our students are doing and how much you have raised, you can tell us here.

One of our fantastic groups of students won our Proud to be Staffs RAG Fundraising Award of the Year in 19-20 for collecting items for the Nappy Project. 

And you could nominate someone for our 2020-21 Proud to be Staffs Awards here.