A celebration of volunteering
It’s Volunteers’ Week, and we’re celebrating the incredible work that Oxford Hub members are doing to build a better Oxford. We couldn’t do what we do without you generously contributing your time, skills and enthusiasm — thank you!
At Oxford Hub, we’re all about building relationships that help empower people. Everyone who volunteers on our programmes is absolutely central to this — through the relationships they make with us, with each other, and in the community. This focus on relationships helps to break down the traditional divide between volunteers helping their community and beneficiaries being helped. That’s why we don’t usually talk about ‘volunteers’ or ‘beneficiaries’ at Oxford Hub — we prefer to think about these people in terms of relationships. So to us, the amazing people involved in our programmes are learners, mentors, tutors, leaders, callers and callees, neighbours — and more than that, they’re all Oxford Hub members, part of our community within a community.
To celebrate Volunteers’ Week, we’ve had a look through the Oxford Hub blog archive to bring you some of the most inspiring stories about volunteering from our members.
Volunteering can be a transformative experience — Hub members establish friendships with people they might not otherwise have met, like many of the people involved in our Big Brothers Big Sisters programme. Volunteering can also help members develop new skills and build their confidence, as experienced by a student who attended a Placement at Oxford Hub, volunteering behind the scenes
For students, volunteering offers a way to connect with Oxford city beyond the colleges, and discover new passions and career paths — it can even help you secure a job after graduation! For Oxford residents, volunteering is an opportunity to meet new people and learn new skills. Yasmin, a session leader for our FELLOW English classes, realised that she was learning as much from her students as she was teaching.
The covid pandemic presented us with new challenges and new volunteering opportunities. In turn, volunteering helped create a sense of purpose and community for Hub members far away from their families, like our Phone Links caller Lee.
Volunteering doesn’t have to be a big time commitment — our members fit it in around jobs and degrees — but if you love it, you can also join the ranks of our ‘extreme volunteers’ who go above and beyond. When Hub members reflect on the difference they’ve made in their community, words like ‘priceless’ and ‘joy’ come up a lot.
Feeling inspired to do some volunteering yourself? Get in touch or have a look at our website, and be part of something amazing!
[Please note that not all the programmes mentioned in the blog posts are currently running — to see what volunteering opportunities are available at the moment, have a look at our website.]
