Support for Schools and Divisions

Every Academic School has a named person within the volunteer staff team to provide bespoke support. This could include:

  • Support and Awareness raising for academic advisors etc
  • Bespoke communications and marketing to students such as involvement in events, case studies and information for newsletters.
  • Sharing of best practice for Schools supporting their own volunteers on projects (UK and international)
  • Recognition through support for School awards and celebration events
  • Access to School-related statistics on volunteering
  • Support for the creation of bespoke projects and opportunities tailored to students’ skill sets.

Student Volunteering Network

The Student Volunteering Network is an informal group established to help share best practice. It meets three times a year and aims to do the following:

  • Allow interested parties to come together to share information and best practice;
  • Increase opportunities for joint working and collaboration;
  • Provide a platform for communication;
  • Support the development of information and processes for student volunteering e.g. website / Volunteer Hub;
  • Provide opportunities to engage with external stakeholders where appropriate.

The network is mainly for practitioners whose work involves student volunteering in some way and School leads with a responsibility for volunteering (for example, student experience, social responsibility or employability leads)

If you would like to find out more about joining the Student Volunteering Network please contact volunteers@manchester.ac.uk.

Online support to staff with an interest in volunteering is also provided through a bespoke Sharepoint site. This includes a range of resources including promotional material, reports and photos. You can access this here. Please note: This site is not open access and therefore you will need to request to be added to the membership list.

Support for colleagues’ volunteer projects

Often colleagues approach volunteering staff for support and guidance in recruiting and managing student volunteers who they would like to support areas of their own work. This could include outreach projects that benefit the local community or public engagement opportunities. Please note we do not support students to volunteer on research projects.

In such cases we are able to provide consultancy on best practice relating to the recruitment, training, retention and reward of volunteers. Such projects can also be advertised through Volunteer Hub. In these cases many of the processes are the same as for our partner organisations please see our separate organisation-facing pages for further information. www.manchester.ac.uk/getvolunteers