How do we support student leaders to create an authentic sense of community?
At the December Student Opportunities Managers Network (SOMN) session Elisabeth Whittall will be sharing more information about an ongoing project considering what the future of student volunteering will look like at University of Manchester Students' Union.
Ahead of the session, Lissie has written a short blog about the project and what questions they are still facing. We’re inviting all managers working within student opportunities to come and contribute to the discussion - How do we support student leaders to create an authentic sense of community?
In line with trends across the sector, we believe that paid work is becoming an increasingly prevalent feature of student life at the University of Manchester and are concerned about the implications for our voluntary student leader programmes.
As university focus shifts increasingly towards employability as a metric of student success and UMSU has itself trialed some paid student leader roles over the last couple of years, it’s not hard to see how volunteering may become devalued in the eyes of students looking to survive university and secure precious graduate opportunities in a competitive market.
Our Union believes our student leader roles are important – both for the students who undertake them and for the students who want to participate in the wonderful and sometimes unusual activities they run. This leaves us with a key question – how do we ensure our student leader roles remain attractive and relevant enough to successfully compete for student time?
We’ve decided to tackle this issue by viewing our student leader programmes through a volunteer management lens. We’re working with officers to vision a future for student leadership that provides opportunities for students to volunteer their skills in return for personal benefits. Practically, this means reviewing and updating our practice in four key areas:
Volunteer management
Reward & recognition
Learning & development
Connection & belonging
By far the trickiest aspect of this project to pin down has been understanding the Union’s role in fostering connections between our student leaders. Officers and staff frequently cite a desire for student leaders to feel like they belong to a leadership community and collaborate on projects, but only 60% of our student leader cohort felt connected to the wider student leader community last year.
So the question we’ll be exploring together is “how do you support student leaders to form an authentic sense of community?”