Building a highly effective volunteer-community
People often roll their eyes at student volunteer work. Despite having grown Project Access to a community of 5,000 people, we get questions on it in almost every interaction we have with potential funders. How do you manage to work with volunteers? Isn’t it a huge risk? Why are they motivated to work for you? Will they keep wanting to work for you?
Simply put, student volunteering has a bad reputation. At the same time, we know that students have in their spare time have created some of the most innovative and high-powered start-ups. Although we wouldn’t want to get ahead of ourselves and compare ourselves to these giants (yet) it’s also how we started. So there is a discrepancy here. How can we both live in a world where some of the most high-powered start-ups grow out of university students’ free time, and also where student volunteers are inherently lazy and difficult to work with?
Well, we don’t. For a long time, initiatives targeting students have been spared even the most basic management practices. And even in courses where management is taught, the applications of it on starting and running an organisation are often completely neglected. What we’ve realised is that by having well-run and selective recruitment practices, setting high expectations from everyone we work with and disseminating best-practices for management, we can improve the quality of work significantly.
Of course, there is more to it than this. I would be the last person to understate the challenge in setting this up, but it can be done, and in the next few weeks I’ll be sharing the things we think have been most important for taking us to where we are today: an organisation started by students and powered by students. Our team of 160 people consists of a group of 158 highly effective volunteers and 1.5 paid staff. We, in turn, spend our time setting up the infrastructure to make sure that the 3,000 mentors we have signed up are equipped with all the necessary materials they need to mentor.
Project Access’s structure works because volunteers are not just part of our organisation, they are our organisation. The 158 volunteers on our team are students who do this on the side of their studies. All the 160 team members in Project Access own the project — not in shares (we’re a non-profit), but in feeling a sense of responsibility for making this work. We know that the problem is big, and we know that with our campus presence we are in a unique position to solve it.
At this point you probably want a bit of context around the issue we’re trying to solve. Let me try to keep it brief. Students from underrepresented backgrounds are severely less likely to go to a top university than their peers. If we look at the more general divide between state school students and private school students, a state-school is five times less likely to apply and get in to a Russell Group university even when they have the same results. That’s pretty appalling. In part because many of these students will have already beaten the odds by getting such good results.
Right, so back to the team. Our team members are starters. They care about the issue because they see it every day on campus, and their experiences make them excellent sources of ideas for how to solve it. They’ve been selected for the team because we believe they will tackle the challenges we come up against with a can-do approach, and that they will question us and put their opinions forward when they disagree. This doesn’t mean that we always act in a way that everyone agrees with — it would be a disaster for a new organisation that needs to be agile to take 160 different opinions into account — but that we know what the concerns are when we act. When we bring people on board we make it clear that as a small organisation we prefer to act quickly and actively analyse the results as we go rather than spend too much time deliberating. There are several ways of doing things so that they get done but only one way of not getting things done, and that is to not do them.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some of the key lessons we’ve learned from starting Project Access. I’ll intersperse my rants with more interesting articles from some of our best volunteers to give you a sense of who they are and why they do what they do.
We hope you’ll stay with us and (as is customary in Project Access by now) that you’ll be really honest with any feedback or thoughts you have and send it straight to anna@projectaccess.co so that we can get better.
—
Anna Gross
Co-founder and CEO at Project Access
