Facilitating student volunteering

How can you help your students prepare for volunteering?

1.  Encourage students to think about the benefits and how it can contribute to their employability skills. Competencies and skills developed in volunteering can be recorded and included as evidence in Personal Development Planning.
2. Point out that volunteering doesn't need to take up a lot of time. It could take the form of one hour per week, for example, helping at a local after school club or serving in a local charity shop.
3. Encourage students to choose appropriate volunteering opportunities for maximum benefit.
4. Promote the inclusion of volunteering competencies on their CVs - employers favour it.

You might discuss with students how they are planning to build their CVs-perhaps as a PDT activity or in class time.

Click for an example of a CV that includes evidence of volunteering used to evidence employability.

I want to encourage my students do undertake some volunteering activity...

What are the routes?

There are two main routes to facilitate student volunteering; firstly as part of formal learning such as a co-curricular module, secondly as an extracurricular activity where students decide to undertake volunteering in their spare time.

Route 1
As part of formal learning
If you are considering incorporating volunteering into an existing module (whether subject based or co-curricular), module development would follow all the normal quality processes.
Advice should be sought from relevant Subject Leaders, School quality staff and Programme Leaders throughout the development period. The most important question is whether volunteering will support students in meeting the module learning outcomes. Other issues to consider include:

• Who will be responsible for identifying the volunteering opportunities?
  
• How will the learning from the volunteering activity be assessed?
  
• How will the students be supported in reflecting on and articulating the learning they have achieved from their volunteering activity?
  
• Is there a procedure in place to deal with early termination of a volunteering commitment?  (e.g. is there alternative provision or opportunities to fulfil learning outcomes?)

The module Volunteering and Employability HSS08100 might be suitable for use or could act as an exemplar for development.

Route 2
Informal volunteering

Volunteering exists in many arenas. The links below gives contacts for a number of organisations offering volunteering opportunities and may help when talking to students about seeking out formal or informal volunteering to enhance their learning.

Where can students access volunteering opportunities?

There are a number of ways that students can access voluntary organisations. Some examples are:

• Joining a local volunteering group
  
• Taking a responsible role in an Napier Student Association society
  
• Approaching charitable organisations
  
• Contacting organisations where volunteering is evident (e.g. NHS)
  

Reflecting on learning from volunteering

To maximise the benefits of volunteering, students should be encouraged to reflect on their learning. An example recording sheet and some typical reflective questions can be found here.