Celebrating Volunteers' Week 2016

By Lucy Goodwill, Volunteer Development Manager at IntoUniversity

Today sees the beginning of Volunteers’ Week, an annual celebration of the contribution volunteers make to society and their communities. 

This year the theme is 'The Big Celebration', meaning that the week will, in fact, go on for 12 days! 

Across the UK, from now until Sunday 12^th June, charities and organisations will be running events and campaigns to recognise and showcase their volunteers.

IntoUniversity is no different, and we plan to celebrate in style. This year we will be launching our first ever Volunteer Conferences, offering our regular volunteers the chance to access additional training and to feed into the development of our volunteering strategy. We will also be holding our annual volunteer celebration event in London this evening, following on from our London conference, to share this year’s highlights and successes with a range of our valued supporters.

Online, we will be sharing quotes and photos from a number of the amazing people who donate their time to support us, as well as sharing updates from our events. In our centres, teams will be celebrating their volunteers with face-to-face thank yous.

Finally, we will be ending Volunteers’ Week by launching our Volunteer Associate Network. This new scheme will allow volunteers to keep in touch with our work once they’ve finished in their role. The scheme will offer volunteer alumni the chance to receive digital updates on the charity’s progress alongside invitations to events, so that the end of a volunteering programme doesn’t mean the end of a volunteer’s relationship with us.

We are really excited about these new developments and can’t wait to begin the celebrations. Without volunteers we simply couldn’t provide the support or achieve the success that we do – thank you so much to everyone who has volunteered with us this year and we look forward to the next year of incredible volunteering.

To find out more about the volunteering opportunities available at IntoUniversity, visit our website here or email volunteering@intouniversity.org.