Category: Volunteering

Could you do with increasing your volunteering capacity? Active Student, the University of Brighton’s dedicated volunteering team, have over 300 students who need to complete either 30 or 50 hour volunteering placements.

Active Student wants to work in partnership with organisations from the third and public sectors and welcomes contact from anyone who could benefit from a student giving them up to 50 hours of volunteering.

These roles can be in situ (government Covid 19 restrictions permitting) or remote. They can include working with vulnerable people from all walks of life, ages and abilities; animals; the environment; nutrition and food; healthcare to name a few. This list is not exhaustive.

Placements start from October 2021 and are completed by July 2022 (dependent on the course).

When you support a placement you benefit from students’ new ideas and you will be helping the workforce of the future by giving students the opportunity to gain knowledge and make a positive contribution to a real life project.

Active Student is proud that each year some of its students make such an impact that organisations go on to offer them employment after their placement has ended.

If you have insurance that covers volunteers, can support a student volunteer just as you would another volunteer then please contact Active Student today!

To find out more or express your interest, please email activestudent@brighton.ac.uk including the following in your response:

• What roles you have available
• How many students you can host (if you are not sure, say and Active Student will call to discuss)

This year we are excited to announce the launch of a story competition for Sussex Day.

Entries are now open for our competition celebrating inspirational volunteering stories at local charities and community groups across Eastbourne, Lewes District and Wealden.

Over the last year, we know that our local voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector has stepped up to meet the needs of people right across our area, supporting some of the most vulnerable in our communities. To celebrate Sussex Day on 16 June, we want to showcase some of the amazing volunteers who have made a difference.

Four winning VCSE groups or organisations will each receive a £250 cash prize.

Find out more and enter

We all recognise that the volunteering effort in East Sussex and across the U.K. since the coronavirus outbreak started to impact has been incredible. People who were already giving their time freely and people coming forward for the very first time have been amazing. We have witnessed people coming together and the response of our sector has been magnificent.

For those of you whose role it is to engage and involve volunteers…what does it all mean?!

If you are from a group based in Eastbourne, the Lewes District or Wealden and are in role engaging and involving volunteers, it doesn’t matter if you have been doing it for five years (or more!), months or minutes …

We would like to invite you to participate in our first free online Volunteer Coordinators’ Forum, Volunteering during a pandemic on Thursday 11 June from 10:00 am to 12 noon.

During this online meeting you will have the opportunity to;

• Get the latest national and local news updates about volunteering.
• Meet other people in a role like yours and explore potential new ways of networking.
• Discover how you could recruit volunteers who have come forward to 3VA and offered to help with the crisis.
• Learn which volunteer roles should require a background police check and why.
• Find out more about a new volunteer support service, 3VA is working on with Holding Space.
• Take part in a question and answer session about what volunteering currently looks like during the pandemic and how it might develop.

Participation in the Forum is completely free but to make the meeting manageable online we will be limiting places for up to 15 people, so to be sure of your place, please book early.

Pre-booking is essential, but easy! To secure your place please book online and if you would like to know more before making a booking, please contact Lee Shepherd on 07535 992 638 or email lee.shepherd@3va.org.uk.

Someone once said that if you want to truly measure the positive impact that volunteers have on our well being across the UK, then just mobilise them to go ‘on strike’ for a day and then you will fully realise the enormous contribution that they make!

A bit drastic perhaps and we probably all know that most volunteers would never consent to taking that kind of action. But, we should never ever take that contribution for granted. In normal times, without willing and wonderful volunteers, hundreds more people would be lost at sea without RNLI volunteers and tho

usands more people would be more isolated and lonely without the friendly ear of a befriending volunteer. And those are just a couple of examples of the hugely beneficial and valuable voluntary contribution that thousands

of people make to so many facets of our society.

Now, more than ever during the coronavirus outbreak, the role played by volunteers has helped our nation to try to come to terms with and cope with the impact this crisis is having upon everyone in this country and other parts of the world too. We are all hearing of communities coming together and the ‘glue’ in that coming together is volunteering. Every day, stories reach us here at 3VA of incredible acts of kindness and people are courageously and selflessly joining with people who already volunteered previously, to come forward for the first time and lend a hand.

As many of you will know, 3VA has over the years run numerous volunteer training workshops and forums and we have been wonderfully supported in our work by our own dedicated team of volunteers and we wanted to mark what would ordinarily be national Volunteers Week (1-7 June) by offering our profound thanks and admiration for everything that volunteers are doing locally in our communities and further afield too.

We can’t gather together face to face to acknowledge that this year and that in itself hurts. Ideally, we would like to shake each and every volunteer by the hand and thank them personally for their contribution. It’s feels hard not to be able to do that. For now we will have to content ourselves with messages like this and sharing volunteering stories with the #CheersforVolunteers.

So…to everyone out there who has made and is making a voluntary contribution and to those people who are supporting volunteers to do that, all of us at 3VA want to offer an enormous ‘thank you’…what you are doing is not taken for granted, no matter how big or small you may feel that your contribution is…it matters and makes a real difference to everyone’s well-being…you are all stars…you are all heroes!

Wishing you a safe and happy Volunteers Week from everyone at 3VA.