HEACF: case studies of good practice

Infrastructure

The HEACF was for some institutions an open opportunity to put into place volunteering programmes that had not previously existed. It was also an opportunity for those HEIs with volunteering programmes to expand, to reorganise and to apply quality procedures for which there had previously been little time or funding.

Many HEIs and students can take for granted the existence of the volunteering culture and volunteering opportunities, purely due to the longevity of volunteering programmes available on campus, or through the students' union, or even in the institution's own outreach and widening participation programmes. For some HEIs, this wealth of opportunity simply did not exist before the HEACF. For others, such diversity of opportunity led to a lack of cohesion in communicating with students, beneficiary organisations and the local community. In more extreme cases, this diversity and longevity of volunteering may have led to a lack of resources in some areas, or worse still, complacency.

This section takes on some of the bigger issues faced by HEIs when undertaking the HEACF:

• what to do when no volunteering structure exists
• how to build and organise a volunteering department
• how to reorganise volunteering for the whole of the institution
• how to get students to take responsibility for running volunteering programmes
• how to introduce monitoring and quality assurance systems.

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