This resource has been created by Edge Hill University Careers
Authors: Lynn Anderton Careers Engagement Adviser
Latest Update: April 2024
Volunteering can help you to build your experience; put the skills you have learned into practice whilst trying something new. It can be a way into your graduate career and provides a great opportunity to give something back to the community.
Careers Engagement Advisers have included roles that can be done wherever you are in the UK. Edge Hill University therefore do not have agreements in place with many of the organisations listed and we recommend you read the Student Volunteering Handbook before you sign up. We cannot guarantee the level of support you will receive from the organisation. However, this is a starting point for students looking to see what is available. If you would like more help or guidance please read on to find out how to contact a Careers Engagement Adviser.
What you will find on these pages:
- Links to Volunteering Resources
- How to get help from Careers Engagement Advisers
- Opportunities to volunteer from home starting NOW!
Volunteering Resources
You can find out more information about Volunteering on the Careers website, read about students who have volunteered and been recognised for their contribution, and access resources including:
Student Volunteer Handbook We recommend that all students read the Student Volunteer Handbook. This gives more information on how volunteering can benefit you, support your career goals, and give back to the community. It includes hints and tips to help you choose the right role for you.
International volunteering is an exciting experience, but it also means hard work far from home so it is vital that you are passionate and enthusiastic about it. Whilst we do not advertise opportunities abroad on our online vacancy pages, if you are considering volunteering overseas we would recommend that you read our International Volunteering Handbook on the Volunteering page
Careers Engagement Advisers
Careers Engagement Advisers are here to help you in sourcing and applying for volunteering roles. EHU students can book a Getting Started With Volunteering with an adviser to find out more. You can also discuss what you are looking for, the opportunities available locally, and to research what's available further afield within the UK.
Once you have found an opportunity Advisers can help you in the application process, for example giving you feedback on your application form. You can contact us using the Ask A Question service and use the CV Review tool to get instant, expert, feedback.
Advisers invite organisations onto campus throughout the academic year to events to promote the opportunities available, and to deliver information sessions to find out more about the work they carry out. Find out more through the Events and Workshops section of the Careers website
What Can I Do?
To ensure you have time for your academic commitments, we recommend that students commit to no more than 16 hours per week of a combination of paid work and volunteering.
Micro volunteering allows you to get involved right now from home, and many roles can be carried out flexibly, when you have the time! There are a wide range of projects in areas including: animals and conservation, mentoring and befriending, sciences projects, and many more!
The following are examples of current roles being advertised. As with all opportunities in this resource, we do not have links with a majority of these organisations. The list is intended to provide a starting point in your search. Please read the Volunteering Handbook. Further roles can be found using the links provided at the end of this document,
Biosciences and Geosciences.
Marsh Explorer Explore the salt marshes with us to learn more about spatial relationships among different species! The field site for this research project is in Georgia. The Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research site (GCE) was established by the National Science Foundation in 2000. The study domain encompasses three adjacent sounds (Altamaha, Doboy, Sapelo) on the coast of Georgia, U.S.A., and includes upland (mainland, barrier islands, marsh hammocks), intertidal (fresh, brackish and salt marsh) and submerged (river, estuary, continental shelf) habitats. With your help on Zooniverse, volunteers also tell us what’s in each photograph. This allows us to create a map of abundance for each species that is derived from the photo-mosaic. This map is what we’ll use for our research.
Woodpecker Cavity Cam Help researchers explore the world of woodpecker cavities and the animals that use them!
Siren Project Help us saving Italian hydrological measurements, don't stop the (data) flow! In Italy, the collection of hydro-meteorological data (e.g. river flow, rainfall and temperature measurements) has been managed at the national level by the National Hydrological and Mareographic Service (Servizio Idrografico e Mareografico Nazionale, SIMN) since the early 1900s. Within the SIREN (Saving Italian hydRological mEasuremeNts) project, we aim to recover the historical series of daily river flows and to produce a consistent dataset. We have already collected, classified and selected 15,823 scanned pages of the Hydrological Yearbooks. They contain daily river flow measurement for all available river gauges in Italy from 1916. Now we need your help to digitize them!
Manatee Chat Identification and classification of manatee calls
Chimp&See Volunteers needed to watch footage from camera traps in chimpanzee habitats from 15 countries across Africa. Identifying species and activity will help the project understand the lives of these apes.
Garden Birdwatch (UK). Stay connected to nature, learn about your garden wildlife and contribute to important scientific research without leaving your home.
Wildlife Trust Action for Insects: Free guide to make a difference today. Find out how to get involved in the Buglife Bugs Matter survey from June 1st 2024 and record the bugs on your car number plate using their downloadable Splatometer grid.
Node Code Breakers Help us annotate the germinal centres, the light pink circles in lymph nodes of breast cancer patients. The science team behind 'Node Code Breakers: looking for patterns in lymph nodes' is working at King's College London . We are mainly computational scientists, trying to identify patterns in many different biological systems that are associated with breast cancer. One major focus of our work is a type of bean-like structure called lymph nodes. Recent technological advances enable us to perform our research much faster, however we still need to assess carefully how much we can rely on these computer programs. Are these computer programs as good as the human eye in spotting these dots? Can the computer programs find something that the human eye would miss? This is why we need your help! We have collected a series of lymph node images and now we need your help to identify the germinal centres within them.
Beluga Bits Examine underwater photos of wild beluga whales and help us identify the age, sex, and group size. We also need keen eye to look for identifying marks to recognize beluga that return to this location year after year.
Floating Forests: Help us uncover the history of Giant Kelp forests around the globe. Most life on the seafloor can only be sampled by SCUBA divers or dredging up samples from the deep. This kind of data requires a ton of (really fun) effort to collect, but it means we’re limited to places we can get to! Given the worldwide distribution of kelp, we need your help to track it across time and space.
Get to Know Medieval Londoners Transcribe extracts and collect biographical details from medieval records. In the 1980s, researchers at the Centre for Metropolitan History in London summarized the important details of medieval property deeds onto thousands of index cards. In order to effectively use the property deeds for research, the information needs to be in a format that computers can read and that can be easily stored and sorted. That's where our volunteers come in.
Name that Neutrino Located at the South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the largest particle detector in the world, using thousands of light sensors buried in the Antarctic ice. It at the forefront of neutrino and multi-messenger astronomy. One of the goals of IceCube is to identify astrophysical neutrino signals and their sources, and understand how they produce such high-energy particles. IceCube consists of more than 5,000 light sensors arranged in a 3D grid one cubic kilometer deep in the South Pole ice sheet. One terabyte of raw data are recorded daily and we need your help to ensure we properly classify these events!
Dark Energy Explorers Identify distant galaxies to help measure dark energy when the universe was just ~2-3 billion years old. The Hobby-Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is designed to find over one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, yielding the largest map of the universe ever produced.
Gravity Spy: Help scientists at LIGO search for gravitational waves, the elusive ripples of spacetime.
Fossil Atmospheres: Count cells of modern & fossil leaves. Help us track climate change over millions of years!
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9: Is there a large planet at the fringes of our solar system awaiting discovery, a world astronomers call Planet Nine? We’re looking for this planet and for new brown dwarfs in the backyard of the solar system using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. But we need your help!
Radio Meteor Zoo: Focusing on meteor showers and using images provided by the Belgian Radio Meteor Stations network that detects and studies the meteoroid population entering the Earth's atmosphere. The network generates a huge amount of data with tens of thousands of meteor echoes detected every day. Your meteor detections will be used to provide activity curves to estimate the mass index of the meteor shower, to calculate meteor fluxes, to compute trajectories of meteoroids using data from multiple BRAMS receiving stations.
People and Communities
Telephone Befriender Lancashire Volunteer Partnership Would you like to make a difference to someone’s week by offering a friendly call? We are looking for people who have excellent listening skills and enjoy a good old fashioned chat on the telephone. Find out more, or apply on the Careers Vacancy Portal Deafblind UK offer a similar role to support clients with sight and hearing loss.
Shout 85258 is a free, confidential, 24/7 text messaging support service for anyone who is struggling to cope. Launched publicly in May 2019 and they have had more than 750000 conversations with people who are anxious, stressed, depressed, suicidal or overwhelmed and who need immediate support. Trained Shout Volunteers are invaluable and at the heart of everything they do. They are often the first person texters have spoken to about how they are feeling. They will work to take someone in distress to a calmer place. Shout are particularly looking for volunteers who can offer support during the night time and early hours of the morning.
Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call.
Missing Maps: Each year, disasters around the world kill nearly 100,000 and affect or displace 200 million people. Many of the places where these disasters occur are literally 'missing' from any map and first responders lack the information to make valuable decisions regarding relief efforts. Missing Maps is an open, collaborative project in which you can help to map areas where humanitarian organisations are trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people.
Omega Care for Life Make a real difference to someone’s life. As a Chatterbox Befriender you’ll offer one to one telephone support by establishing a trusting, supportive relationship with a client. Omega volunteers come from all walks of life but have a little time to spare and want to make a difference. This ‘home’ volunteering role is very worthwhile and rewarding.
Children, Families, Health and Education
Infinite Family Through computers and the Internet, Video Mentors (21 years +) fill the void as “one supportive adult” when local adults are not available to support teens in turning toxic stress into lifetime resilience and coping strength.
GT Scholars is a not-for-profit social enterprise and registered charity that is open to all young people. they run a range of in-school and after-school leadership programmes that help young people aged 11-18, achieve their academic and career aspirations! They are always looking for volunteers that can mentor scholars or provide one-to-one tutoring support in Maths or English up to GCSE. Volunteer tutors, must have a degree or currently be studying at university. Volunteers need to be available to tutor online for 1 hour a week.
Post Pals The charity helping you to ‘Post a Smile on a Sick Child’s Face’ by the sending of cards, letters, emails and little gifts to seriously ill children and their siblings in the UK.
FamilyLine Volunteering with FamilyLine can make a huge difference to the lives of families. Being part of a family can often be difficult without emotional support and guidance there to help. Many people feel confused by what information is available or struggle to access services close to home. (Telephone volunteering)
Science Scribbler - Placenta Profiles: Help us understand mitochondrial dynamics in the placenta, and train computers to analyse new data even faster in the future!
Shout At Shout 85258, our trained Shout Volunteers are invaluable and at the heart of everything we do. They are often the first person our texters have spoken to about how they are feeling. They will work to take someone in distress to a calmer place. If you like the sound of joining this incredible community, read on! We are currently only looking for people who can commit to volunteering during the night time and early hours of the morning for us. If you are a night owl and can commit to volunteering from 8pm onwards, we’d love to hear from you!
Bookmark As a Bookmark volunteer you’ll help a 5-8 year-old learn to read, so that they can succeed in school and beyond. You will read together, play games, and see your reader progress, all through our secure online platform.
Arts and Humanities
Criminal Characters Tracking the life histories and criminal careers of Australian prisoners
National Archives We've worked with volunteers for over 20 years, enlisting help on a wide range of tasks, from paper cataloguing and conservation to more recent online collaborations. Find out more about volunteering at The National Archives and how we ensure it is an engaging, consistent and well-rounded experience.
Davy Notebooks Project Help us to transcribe the manuscript notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy – one of the most significant and famous figures in the scientific and literary culture of early nineteenth-century Britain, Europe, and America.
LibriVox volunteers read and record chapters of books in the public domain (books no longer under copyright), and make them available for free on the Internet.
Shadows on Stone Uncover the hidden histories of those incarcerated at Sing Sing Prison from 1865-1925 by transcribing the hand-written admission registers.
The Smithsonian: Become a Smithsonian Digital Volunteer and help us make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible.
PR, Marketing and Computing
Social Coder connects volunteer programmers with charities for specific projects. They welcome programmers, designers, IT experts and individuals with software development skills.
Online Digital Marketing TES Youth are looking for Online Digital Marketing volunteers to join their team, who will play a key role in the growth of their brand messages and visions. The ideal candidate will assist them to grow their on-line presence and increase traffic to their digital channels.
PR Volunteer, PASIC. Are you a PR professional who could donate a couple of hours each month to write press releases and use your contacts to get local coverage for PASIC? We've increased our support over the last five years for families across the East Midlands facing childhood cancer. We want to get the message out there, raise our profile and shout about the great things we do.
FCancer This is a hub designed to help you contribute your skills to support cancer relief charities. You can help by providing photography, videography and/or graphic design skills.
Volunteer Content Creator Lacrosse Foundation are looking for a volunteer to help create content for their social media, website, and quarterly newsletter.
Law, Business, Admin, and Finance
Criminal Characters Tracking the life histories and criminal careers of Australian prisoners
Bullyid is a future AI app that combines psychology & law principles to proactively identify bullying with an AI-analysis. The premise of Bullyid is simple: We want to fight fire with water. Bystander intervention is a best practice for addressing all forms of violence, but so often when harassment happens in person people aren’t around, and if they are around, they aren’t sure what to do. Roles include: Legal, Marketing, Research, Graphic Design and Writing.
HaliPuu addresses three challenges: mental health, consumption and climate. Research shows that mental and physical well-being is increased considerably through contact with nature. In the Arctic, nature is very fragile, and under serious threat from climate change. This can be hard to understand if not seen and experienced first hand. HaliPuu creates an open, friendly space, where people from all around the world can experience the wholesome Arctic forest nature through mobile and irl platforms. Roles include: Business development, strategy and community development.
Inuka is on a mission to make wellbeing accessible for everyone by empowering empathic humans with the skills to effectively support others to cope better with life's challenges and develop healthy habits, and connect them with a digital platform with people seeking help. Roles include: Legal, Branding and Finance.
Support Through Sportuse a range of positive initiatives as diversion and intervention programmes to support young people whilst tackling negative influences such as knife crime, gang violence, youth offending and serious youth violence. Volunteer roles are offered with the Business Administration, Business Development and Marketing/Promotions teams.
Be Creative
Wiggly Bags We would like volunteers to make Wiggly (Hickman line) bags for children and teenagers. These bags keep ex tubes clean and safe.
Post Pals The charity helping you to ‘Post a Smile on a Sick Child’s Face’ by the sending of cards, letters, emails and little gifts to seriously ill children and their siblings in the UK.
Woolly Hugs is a friendly, busy online community making special blankets, and is run entirely on a voluntary basis. It is hoped that through our work, babies, children and their families will feel support, comfort and the sense of being loved and looked after.
Art UK At Art UK, there are many opportunities to get involved – from tagging artworks to making new discoveries on Art Detective.
Stay Active
There are ways you can use your daily exercise to help or contribute to projects.
Charity Miles download the app, choose your charity, and whilst you are exercising, you move for the causes and people you feel most passionate about.
Ancient Trees If you pass an old tree whist you are on a walk/ride/run.... the Woodland Trust would love you to add it to their online map.
Do something different
As well as coordinating NHS Volunteering The Royal Voluntary Service have a Virtual Village Hall a great source of online events and activities that will help you gain skills and experience, or just do something new. Whether it's Street Dance, Qi Gong, Life Coaching, Junk Printing, or learning Healthy Eating techniques there are lots to get involved with and learn more.
Dementia Friends - Become a Dementia Friend with the Alzheimers' Society. A Dementia Friend is somebody that learns about dementia so they can help their community. Too many people affected by dementia feel that society fails to understand the condition they live with. Dementia Friends help by raising awareness and understanding, so that people living with dementia can continue to live in the way they want. You can sign up online for a virtual information session, or watch the video on their website.
Gobrik Give your time to create ecobricks and remove your single use plastic rubbish from the waste stream. An ecobrick is a PET bottle packed solid with used plastic to the standards of plastic sequestration in order to make a reusable building block. Ecobricking secures plastic out of the biosphere, generates brikcoins and creates reusable building blocks for regenerative building.
Useful websites:
www.wemakechange.org/current-projects
https://www.artsjobs.org.uk/ (Volunteering and paid roles in the arts)
Rewards
Students can use their volunteering to complete our Employability award called Extra Edge
You may be also be eligible for a University Scholarship or to apply for financial support to the Student Opportunity Fund
For volunteering to count towards Extra Edge the hours will need to be verified. Many roles included in this resource require volunteers to register with the charity/organisation and we will be able to make contact to verify those hours. Other roles, are sourced through Zooniverse and they have issued guidance on how you can use your participation in a Zooniverse project to fulfil the hour requirements of awards such as these.
If you are unsure how you could use your online/volunteer from home opportunity towards Extra Edge, please Contact Careers; come to Careers Corner or use Ask A Question
Are you ready to make a start?
Haven't found what you are looking for, or would you like more help?
Careers Engagement Advisers are here to help. You can book a Getting Started With Volunteering Appointment , Drop in to Careers Corner or get in touch using Ask A Question