A handful of the hundreds of tauira who volunteered during Orientation Week.
Every year, hundreds of Otago tauira log thousands of hours of volunteering at dozens of charities and organisations around the city, with the help of the University’s Social Impact Studio.
Tauira are motivated to give up their time for many reasons - some are keen to gain useful experiences, some miss the volunteering they did at high school, and some want to get out of the university bubble.
From helping school children practise their reading, to working with elderly people, gardening, planting, tidying, painting, car cleaning or providing a meal for those in need, tauira have been busy volunteering with organisations around Ōtepoti for more than 10 years.
Social Impact Studio manager Sze-En Watts says the Studio runs a series of programmes which are usually run in collaboration with a community group, such as the Good Deed and Feed.
“Good Deed and Feeds are popular with students for good reason. We organise the project and the transport, and it’s just an easy invitation for students to get on a bus (usually to somewhere beautiful and scenic), do an activity, have some kai and come back,” Sze-En says.
Social Impact Studio manager Sze-En Watts says the studio runs a whole host of programmes that get tauira out in the community.
“It’s a really great one-off thing that students can build into their timetable, especially if they don’t’ have the capacity to commit to something more regular.”
As happens annually, during this year’s orientation week, groups and bus-loads of first-year tauira headed off to a selection of volunteering gigs around the wider Ōtepoti area. They were cleaning up rubbish, weeding, planting, arranging goods for sale, folding clothes at second-hand stores, painting, and making poppies for Anzac Day.
Then, Sze-En says, there are programmes that run across a semester such as Reading Oasis and Aspire which are geared to working with tamariki in primary schools.
Reading Oasis sees student volunteers spending time at Carisbrook School – a primary school in Ōtepoti - reading with tamariki, while Aspire has student volunteers paired up with Year 7 and 8 students from local schools.
“Aspire is focused on keeping kids excited about learning.”
The studio also piloted a couple of new programmes in 2023 including Minds Together which is run in collaboration with Alzheimer’s Otago.
“One of our students, during Brain Injury Awareness Week, spoke to the manager of Alzheimer’s Otago. We set up a meeting, threw some ideas around and cooked up Minds Together.”
During Orientation Week tauira volunteered at a number of different sites around Ōtepoti.
Minds Together was an excellent example of something the Social Impact Studio didn’t know it would end up doing, but was able to in response to a specific community need, Sze-En says.
“Individuals who have early-stage dementia are paired with a student buddy. They meet on campus across seven weeks. The sessions start with good chats over morning tea before the group is hosted by a university department that has volunteered to run a session.”
Last year also saw the Social Impact Studio trial a programme which was a little bit different to anything they had done before – Future Proof came about as a response to some of the findings in the 2023 New Zealand State of Volunteering report where community organisations stated that their single biggest concern is their aging pool of volunteers.
“But then young people were saying ‘it would be helpful for organisations to think about why they might be struggling to attract and retain young people as volunteers’.”
The Social Impact Studio and Volunteer South got together to see what they could do. Since then, student volunteers have taken time to get know the organisations and their volunteer programmes, and have gone on to provide both practical and strategic recommendations for how they could hopefully increase and retain young people as volunteers.
The Social Impact Studio also promotes a huge range of volunteer opportunities on behalf of community organisations seeking volunteers. This is done via Priceless – the UniCrew Store, creatively using the “shop function” on the UniCrew page. Here, tauira can choose roles that they would like to get involved with.
Tauira interested in getting involved can learn more about the Social Impact Studio, and more of its volunteering opportunities, via its website.