Student Volunteering Week 2016

If you were asked to describe what being a student is about what would you say? Studying until the early hours of the morning? Big nights out on the town? Making new friends? Or how about volunteering your time to positively impact the local community?

Since the 1890’s, university students have been volunteering in order to give back to their adopted communities. Over 125 years later students are still making a significant contribution in the communities where they live. A recent NUS study states that 57 per cent of students in further education are volunteering in their communities.

Student volunteering has been a huge part of ReachOut ever since we were founded in 1994 by a group of university students. Starting out with just 20 young people from Manchester, ReachOut now operates across two locations working with over 1,000 young people each year. As we use a one-to-one mentoring model this means that we’re also working with over 1,000 volunteers each year, with 92% of our current Manchester volunteers and 65% of our current London volunteers studying alongside their volunteering.

Each February we support the nationwide Student Volunteering Week to celebrate the amazing work that our student volunteers do. This year we have asked our young people to tell us how their mentor has helped them and will also be running several activities during our sessions to say thank you to our volunteers!

ReachOut would not be here without the time and dedication that our volunteers show us! Volunteering two hours a week may not sound like much but in doing so you are helping your young person to achieve their potential and go on to lead a good and happy life.

So to all of our volunteers, we want to say thank you, on behalf of ourselves and the young people we work with each week!