Volunteer wearing a t-shirt that reads 'VOLUNTEER'

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Student Volunteering Week 2022: King's students reflect on the benefits of volunteering

11 February 2022

Volunteering goes beyond creating positive change at King's, it also provides opportunities for students to gain skills and improve their wellbeing. In this special feature for Student Volunteering Week, members of the newly established Student Advisory Board for King's Volunteering reflect on the many benefits of voluntary activities and giving back to society.

Volunteering during my studies has allowed me to become a well-rounded student and transfer those skills […] into my academic life.– Catalina (BSc International relations)

For Soamopriya (MRes Translational Cancer Medicine), volunteering has helped enhance her student experience at King’s by enabling her to ‘build strong connections with other students, local businesses and different charities in our community.’ Similar sentiments were shared by her fellow board members Catalina (BSc International Relations) and Koen (MSc China & Globalisation). Catalina highlights how volunteering at Big Blue Ocean Clean-up added to her studies and helped her to ‘truly absorb the relevance of environmental sustainability.’ While Koen emphasises that ‘Being a student is not only about writing papers or reading literature, but it is also about gaining practical knowledge and skills. This is something that volunteering can provide very well.’

The Student Advisory Board members also discussed how volunteering can provide new and unique experiences for students. Passionate about women’s rights and reproductive health, Sydney (Law LLB) volunteered in Wonder Works Asia, a charity dedicated to empowering and upskilling women and children in Nepal. Reflecting on this experience, Sydney says she ‘gained a special perspective from meeting the young students in Nepal and learned to accept and understand different beliefs.’

What is the The Student Advisory Board?

The Student Advisory Board (King’s Volunteering) is a diverse group of students, passionate about creating the best volunteering experience for the King’s community. The first group of its kind, the Student Advisory Board was formed in November 2021, after a rigorous application and interview process, to shape the plans and delivery of King’s Volunteering, a brand new service launching in spring 2022.

The aim of the Student Advisory Board is to advocate for students’ needs and champion volunteering in their faculties when the new digital volunteering platform is launched. Their responsibilities include community partnerships, accessibility, and marketing and communications. The group consists of eleven motivated students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, from all nine faculties and a range of backgrounds.

Members of the Student Advisory Board have a range of experience supporting a variety of causes through paid extracurricular activities. Suliman (BSc Computer Science) took part in the Inclusive Education Programme at King’s which changed his perspective on what volunteering meant and what it could look like. As he put it, ’the experience has helped me realise that volunteering can be done in your own community and doesn’t need to be a strong social cause, but any way in which an improvement can be created.’ Through this role, Suliman worked with other Inclusive Education Programmes to carry out focus groups to better understand lived experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic students within the faculty and create a range of suggestions and resources to improve the university experience of these students.

Zaynab (BSc Biomedical Science) was a charity leader at her school, helping to organise events and fundraise for various charities such as Mind and Prostate Cancer UK. She helped to inspire younger students to fundraise and learn about different charities and causes. Discussing the positive impact this experience has had on her, Zaynab said: ‘I have gained an unforgettable experience [...] a true interest in volunteering. It is possible to have a work-life balance and explore something you love [...] and it’s had a positive impact on my wellbeing.’

Service at King's and volunteering

The vision of King’s College London is to make the world a better place, going above and beyond what might conventionally be expected of a university. To this end a commitment to Service is the third and equal part of the university’s academic mission, alongside Education and Research. Service at King’s embodies the university’s historic ethos of operating in ‘service to society,’ manifested in a commitment to positive social impact, at home in London, across the UK and around the world.

Find out more about Service at King’s

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