< Guest Post > Manchester Leadership Program - Students That Change The World

im·pact           noun                Pronunciation: /ɪmpakt/

• The action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another
• Marked effect or influence

We love shouting about what our students get up to. Mainly because students often get bad press about being lazy, beer-guzzling specimen. However, our team on the Manchester Leadership Programme (MLP) know different to this common misconception.

A bit of basics before we get started….

The Manchester Leadership Programme is an accredited module students can take at The University of Manchester, combining academic study with volunteering. Once they’ve completed both elements of the module, students receive the Manchester Leadership Award – bronze, silver or gold, depending on how many hours they volunteer (20 hours, 40 or 60).

Last academic year, a whopping 1,206 students took the module, and 83% completed their volunteering commitment.

This translates as 48,114 hours of volunteering. If it was turned into working solidly, with no breaks or sleep, it works out as five and a half years volunteering for one person, and divided into working days, would be 26.5 years!

In its six years that the MLP has been running, financial contribution through volunteering totals almost three quarters of a million pounds.

But, enough about us...

We couldn’t have achieved these facts and figures without all the amazing organisations that provide us with so many volunteering opportunities, and of course the dedicated students we work with on a daily basis. We work with over 300 organisations on a regional and national scale, and so the scope of what our students get up to is huge!

To start things off, I’d like to talk about a volunteering initiative we run every February during Student Volunteering Week, dubbed ‘The Great Fundraise’. Students project manage fundraising events for a chosen charity, and then run these events during, or soon after, Student Volunteering Week. This year, we had seven groups of students each supporting a different charity and collectively they raised over £3,000.

One charity selected by students was none other than The Children’s Air Ambulance themselves. Lindsey Milton, Erin Mills and Emily Prieditis chose this charity to focus their fundraising efforts, and enthusiastically began brainstorming ideas from the word go.

We delivered a fundraising training session for participating students, and saw the creative sparks fly, as each group bounced ideas around the room. Granted, we had to tame some of the wilder ideas (one group were keen to host a ‘wet t-shirt’ competition(!)), but it was great to see these ideas blossom into something workable.

The Children’s Air Ambulance Trio straight away knew to tailor their fundraising activities to the nature of the charity. They hosted a pub quiz which had a strong correlation with children, youth and The Children’s Air Ambulance, and have just completed a sponsored walk to Bury. Donations are still coming in strong so we don’t yet know the combined final total for this group, but you can donate to the girls’ JustGiving page here!

The ‘The Children’s Air Ambulance Trio’ were “thrilled” to have been asked to volunteer long term with the charity – a challenge they are “looking forward to”, which demonstrates the sustainable impact this volunteering has had.

The beauty of working with over 1,300 volunteers this academic year is the variety of people we meet. I’d like to think this is reflected in the diverse range of volunteering projects MLP students take part in.

A bit of a break down…

‘Operation Impact’ is something we run bi-annually. It’s a week long, large-scale volunteering project in which 200+ students physically transform a different community space each day. Past beneficiaries have included schools, a scout hut, sheltered accommodation grounds and more. The visual impact that the students have made on these community spaces would put DIY SOS and Ground Force to shame!

We also offer these types of projects on a smaller scale in the way of something called ‘MLP Challenges’ – one day events that aim to challenge students to make a difference with a particular organisation.

The variety of MLP Challenges is immense, which makes the old 9-5 stint very interesting! Take last month, for example, we ran 19 Challenges over a five-day period. These ranged from putting on talent shows for service users in a resource centre for older people, hosting a ‘blind bowling’ fundraising evening in aid of RNIB, decorating rooms and painting a mural for a local resource centre for children and young people, to habitat protection tasks in local parks.

It’s clear to see what a positive impact the students are creating when this level of volunteering occurs in just five days!

For the meaty, juicy volunteering initiatives we have ‘MLP Challenge Projects’. They usually run for about six to eight weeks. Students work with an organisation on developing a project, idea or event. The impact of these projects are immense; they give students a real sense of ownership, in everything from providing IT lessons to ‘Silver Surfers’, to creating ‘sensory story books’ for adults with learning disabilities.   

Projects that wholly make a difference to the local community are student-led projects; these usually run over a whole semester or an entire academic year. Normally there are about ten projects, all of which give students absolute ownership over the planning, creativity and implementation of supporting a diverse range of organisations. This year’s student-led groups have supported Cancer Research UK, Baguely Sure Start Centre, Oxfam, After Adoption, Barnardos, and READ International, to name a few.

‘Impact’ is a funny way to describe how the student volunteers make a difference in their community, given that the common definition of impact is “…one object coming forcibly into contact with another.”

At first, this appears boisterous and unruly. Yet, if you take ‘object’ to be the body of students, and ‘forcibly’ to describe the sheer dedication and energy that students give to each project, I can safely say MLP students definitely do, make an impact.

If you want to find out more about the MLP or volunteering with The University of Manchester then by all means, visit our webpage:

www.mlp.manchester.ac.uk/volunteering/

We also blog quite a bit, too; you can read all about that here.

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