SVS

A series of talks will be taking place at 'The Gathering' this year about student internships in the voluntary sector, and choosing to pursue a career in the charity world. The event is part of the recent 'SHEEN Placements' project mentioned previously on this site, and is being supported by Student Volunteering Scotland. As part of the talks you will hear about the student internships that have been set up as part of the pilot, and how we hope the placement program will continue in future.

The Gathering is Scotland's main networking event for the voluntary sector. The event is run by the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations and sees participation from a huge range of organisations each year. Free to attend for individuals, it is the best opportunity a student will get to find out about the range of options out there for a rewarding and worthwhile career in the not-for-profit sector.

You can find out more about the Gathering on the SCVO website at www.gatherscotland.org.uk

The student event takes place on Friday 19th February from 11am. The Gathering is taking place this year in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The EICC is within walking distance of Haymarket train station and easily accessible by a number of bus routes. The Gathering website has a list of directions of how to get there here.

Please pass on the word to students at your institution that may be interested. Further details and if you would like to book a place to guarantee entry, click here and visit this page.

As agreed at the recent Scottish Rag Conference hosted by ESCA, we are now hosting a network for Scottish Rags and students' charitable societies and groups.

Anyone with a direct involvement with such groups is welcome to join, as well as charity reps that engage with student Rags and charities appeals.

The e-mail group is hosted on Google Groups, and you can request to join by clicking here

We hope the network will help the sharing of good practice, ideas and suggestions, and joint working between Rags across Scotland, and better communication with voluntary sector contacts.

Edinburgh Students' Charities Appeal hosted a Scottish Rag Conference on Nov 21st 2009 in the Teviot building. SVS had a presence there offering a presentation on Rag development and a Rag development pack written by our Chair, Phyl Meyer.

Delegates from other Rag groups attended including Strathclyde and Aberdeen, as well as from a few student societies with charitable aims, including the Edinburgh Sick Kids Hospital group.

A very worthwhile event, with thanks due to ESCA, particularly Stephen Shires, for organising it. Hopefully we can look forward to more such events in future with greater participation from other insitutions.

Highlights of the day included an extremely useful presentation from Balfour + Manson LLP, a law firm, who gave delegates a detailed insight into charity law connected to fundraising and some issues they should consider for the proper running of their groups. 

Balfour + Manson kindly agreed to allow us to host a copy of their presentation on our Library page, we suggest you take a look if your are involved in fundraising!

The day was finished off with an excellent discussion about the future of Rag netowkring in Scotland, which concluded with the agreement to create a Scottish Rag Network. SVS agreed to host the email list for this - see later news article on this.

Student Volunteering Scotland is a national development agency for the field of student volunteering. We strategically support and develop student volunteering through engaging with other national agencies, with Government, and of course with student associations and student volunteering leaders.

Our objective is a Scotland where there is a culture of volunteering as a co-curricular activity in education. We believe that during your time as a student is generally one of the best times in a persons life for them to explore the enormous development opportunities that volunteering has to offer. Through partnership working and networking we seek to increase the resources available to student volunteering, raise the profile of the field and achieve greater recognition of its value.

SVS was set up in 2002 and has run a number of successful projects since its creation. These include a number of publications, helping student associations to start new volunteering projects, the SVS Gold Awards, and our first two years of the SVS Annual Conference.

Currently SVS is without a staff resource. This makes it difficult to deliver many of the services we would wish to. We are currently working in partnership with the Scottish Further Education Unit towards creating an exciting new project to develop volunteering within Further Education colleges. We also support a project being undertaken by the Higher Education Academy developing partnership between universities and the voluntary sector, and student work placements in voluntary sector organisations.

In the interim while we have no staff cover it is not possible to reach us by telephone. Please contact us by email if you have any enquiries and a member of our volunteer board will be in touch as soon as they can.

Phyl Meyer, Chair

Leadership - Dedication - Achievement

Student Volunteering Scotland are very proud to run the most prestigious awards for volunteering by students in Scotland – the Student Volunteering Scotland Gold Awards. Sponsored by Volunteer Development Scotland and provided with support from Awards for All.