February Update: New Volunteering, SVW and Preparing for Next Year
February has been a great month full of new volunteering projects and volunteers, celebrating Student Volunteering Week and getting things ready for the next academic year. Here’s what we’ve been up to this month!
New volunteering:
As well as getting 37 new volunteers into our continuing core youth programmes, we also had new volunteering opportunities start this month.
Our Sport England funded programme Active began at Lord’s Hill Youth Project this month with 10 volunteers, including volunteers from Football Beyond Borders who are supporting us to run our sessions for this active mentoring project for 11–15 year olds.
Our first LinkAges tea party of the year was held in Lord’s Hill in collaboration with Communicare, which three volunteers supported.
For the remainder of the year expect to see more new initiatives scaling from our One Community Forum held back in November, and Branch Up Active which will be launching in May.
Student Volunteering Week 2019:
We had lots of events on for Student Volunteering Week this year, a national event where universities, charities and other organisations celebrate all the fantastic work which students do in their volunteering projects across the country.
On Tuesday 12th February Laura, our Hub President, and Sophie, our Empower Coordinator, went on Radio Solent to chat all things student volunteering and about their experience at Southampton Hub. Hear their amazing segment at 0.51 and 1.07 here!
On Wednesday 13th our committee had a stall on the redbrick which was fundraising by selling baked goods, which managed to raise £49. That day we also had three training sessions, a youth projects ‘hack’ with Caro from the School of Education, a session on employability run by Fiona, Southampton Hub Manager, and a session on leadership run by Ben from TeachFirst.
On Thursday 14th we also sent six volunteers to Above Bar Church to support their Big Breakfast event for the homeless, and we hope to run more of these Local Action events with later on in the year.
Thanks to everyone who supported us during Student Volunteering Week and thank you for all the hard work you put into volunteering for Southampton Hub projects! We’ll be celebrating all your work at the annual Southampton Hub Awards which is confirmed for Wednesday 13th March, 6.15pm-8pm.
Preparing for next year:
Already the time has come for us to be looking ahead to 2019–20, with a new committee to be elected next month. We will be sad to say goodbye to our outgoing committee, but it will be wonderful to say hello to new faces and start planning for next year after Easter. You can already apply to our 19–20 committee here, and our AGM will be on Wednesday 20th March, 2–4pm.
We also want to prepare our students for after they leave university, so we’ll be holding more employability sessions next month — stay tuned to Facebook for the latest updates on when those sessions will be held.
That’s it for February! Keep up to date with our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and website in the meantime for any updates, and we look forward to seeing you all in March.