Six things you need to know about student volunteering at UCL

The Volunteering Service, based in the Students’ Union UCL, connects the University with other communities across London by engaging students in enriching volunteering opportunities. But how much do you know about student volunteering?  

Here, we run down the top six things you might not, but definitely should know about student volunteering and community engagement at UCL.  

1.The Volunteering Service can support you with student research and dissertation projects 

The Volunteering Service is not just for students! They provide advice and support to UCL colleagues on issues relating to volunteering and help them build links with London’s voluntary and community sector – for example, for student placements, for research, or for public engagement work. 

The Service’s Community Research Initiative for Students (CRIS) supports UCL’s postgraduate taught students (PGT) to undertake their dissertation in collaboration with not-for-profit organisations. CRIS, a cross-UCL service open to any PGT student, runs skills development sessions and networking and research co-design events for students and external partners.  

2. UCL students are involved in a huge range of volunteering opportunities  

Through their Community Partners work, the Volunteering Service places UCL students with opportunities from their network of around 400 community organisations. In 2019-20, 2,046 UCL student volunteers contributed 55,700 hours of their time. 

Students contribute to a wide range of projects, including:  

• Running language classes for older people.
• Training children to become eye health champions in their communities. 
• Supporting refugees to access financial support and helping them integrate into UK society. 

The Service's Student-Led Volunteering Programme also supports students to set up and run their own community projects. 

In 2019-20, 70 student-led projects were supported, involving 916 students as volunteers and 173 as leaders. These students directly benefitted 1,830 people by working in partnership with 30 London schools and 25 other not-for-profit organisations. 

 3. Volunteers report benefits to their studies, wellbeing and leadership skills 

A 2019-20 survey of volunteers revealed an encouraging picture when it comes to the impact of volunteering on our students:  

• 91% of volunteers felt they’d developed skills that would be useful in the workplace.
• 75% of students said they felt that volunteering had improved their wellbeing. 
• 90% of volunteers said that it had benefitted their studies by giving them relevant skills or experience, helping them put their studies into a social context, or enabling them to pass on their academic knowledge to other people. 

Students who had led their own volunteering projects improved their communication, project and time management skills as a result of their leadership role. 

4. UCL has an ever-growing list of non-profit and community organisation partners, eager to place our students 

The Volunteering Service works with a growing network of around 400 community organisations ready to partner with UCL students. In 2019-20, volunteers worked with partners based across 28 London boroughs, with UCL’s own borough of Camden being the most popular.  

17 not-for-profit organisations also took part in knowledge exchange meetings, or co-designed a research project with students as part of the Community Research Initiative for Students. 

Students from the Data for Good project helped The Mix to better understand our users and user journeys through analysing our service data. The team provided valuable insights that fed into our website research work that will inform design of our new website. – Bohdana Dock, The Mix. 

5. Volunteering can be a short or longer-term commitment  

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to volunteering. Partner organisations have differing needs and the time students can give will vary greatly. The Volunteering Service helps match students to projects so both parties can get the most from the experience.  

Some students are keen to get a greater insight into the Third Sector but don’t have the capacity for an ongoing commitment. The solution? Social Hackathons!  

Flexible, problem-solving volunteer events

Social Hackathons are problem-solving events where UCL volunteers are placed with a not-for-profit organisation for one working day, collectively developing solutions to business issues the organisations face. In teams, UCL students develop skills, learn about the Third Sector and connect with new communities across London.  

Working with London-based organisations such as the Holborn Community Centre, Action on Hearing Loss and the Anna Fiorentini Theatre and Film School, UCL students have ‘hacked’ solutions to a wide range of problems, including creating a museum engagement strategy and developing a more inclusive recruitment process for people with Asperger’s. 

6. Volunteering interest increased during COVID-19 

COVID-19 has affected almost every area of life – with volunteering no exception. The pandemic forced a big drop off in the number of available opportunities as projects are normally face-to-face, but the Volunteering Service sprang into action; they sought ways to continue UCL’s support for community partners faced with radical changes to their services by matching students, whose interest in volunteering rose during the lockdown, with opportunities to help remotely. 

Before volunteering I was disillusioned with my quarantine situation as I had been in Spain´s two-month lockdown since its beginning. But volunteering gave me a reason to wake up earlier, and it trained my Spanish knowledge and prepared me for my interactions with patients in my future career. – Antonio Neves, medical student and online volunteer with Age UK Kensington & Chelsea. 

The Service teamed up with UCL Culture’s Engagement Team to explore how UCL can best ‘Listen and Respond' to the needs of communities and the voluntary sector in London as they confront and recover from COVID-19.  They also created a directory to make it easier for students to find and join grassroots support networks and local authority COVID-19 volunteer pools emerging in response to the pandemic. 

The Social Hackathon programme moved online for a week of virtual one-off events where teams of UCL students and staff worked on business problems set by their community partners. The online Hackathons attracted the highest number of applications from students ever recorded, with 160 applicants for roughly 75 places. 

Related content

• About the Volunteering Service
• How the Volunteering Service works with academic departments

Download the Volunteering Service 2019-20 Annual Report