Department Focus
Stella McHugh graduated from the University of Sheffield in 1995 with a degree in English Literature. Having done quite a bit of volunteering as a student, Stella applied for a job working in volunteering at the Students’ Union. The contract was originally for two months, but 15 years later she is still here, having worked in a variety of roles around the Union. Now she is the manager of Sheffield Volunteering a partnership between the University and the Students’ Union.
Can you give me a rundown of your department’s background?
The tradition goes back to the 60s. When I came here I inherited a project called Student Community Action. At that time there were a number of student led initiatives, some of which still exist today. In 2002 we relaunched the programme as Sheffield Volunteering thanks to some money from the Higher Education Active Community Fund. This enabled us to fill in all the gaps and grow a bigger programme with more ways to get involved. Then, 250-300 students were involved in Sheffield Volunteering. In contrast, the last academic year saw around 1400 staff and students get involved.
When it comes to staff, we get requests from teams throughout the year asking us arrange team building volunteering events and away days. We particularly get a lot of these requests around June time when we run Summer Volidays. Mostly these opportunities are taken up by central services staff, and we’d love to see more faculty teams getting involved.
The last academic year saw around 1400 staff and students get involved.
What are your key priorities?
We’ve been through a process this year to try and develop a mission statement for Sheffield Volunteering. What came through was a term “Active Citizenship” and so our mission became “To inspire and be inspired as an active citizen”. We encourage everyone involved with Sheffield Volunteering to take an active part in their city and become engaged with their immediate society and community.
Our priority is to further develop our role within the city and understand not only the role our volunteers play in it, but also the role we play as an organisation.
What are you, as a department, most proud of?
This is actually a hard question to answer. I suppose I am most proud of the volunteers. Every year I work with a different set of inspiring, passionate, people. Sometimes that passion develops as they learn about themselves; other times they come with a passion for something that they want to make happen. I’ll never cease to be amazed by what people are prepared to give and what they achieve.
It’s humbling actually to work with so many talented people who keep you on your toes, in terms of trying to keep up with them, and to have the capacity to help them reach their goals. They have been external endorsements of Sheffield Volunteering helping us to be recognised as a model of good practice. It’s down to them that people hold us in such high regard.
I see the city by what communities we’ve been involved with, and the people there that are local champions for that initiative or that charity.
What are your main challenges right now?
Maintaining the project is our biggest challenge right now. The project has grown enormously since 2002 but there is a limit to capacity. I think part of the challenge also, is to keep the message fresh. That’s not easy when your commitment is to maintain partnerships with local community organisations which have been ongoing, in some cases, for 18 or 20 years. It’s quite difficult to keep it all alive and fresh.
What would you most like to do?
I’d love to do more, a lot more, because I think the only limits we have are staff, space and time. Working with RAG has helped spark some early ideas about what we could do in the future. There is a huge, almost limitless potential to Sheffield Volunteering, but we need to make sure the driving force still comes from a local community need and a passion from the student body. I constantly ask myself how we might do more.
What do you most enjoy about your job?
The thing I enjoy most is the people that I work with. The students can be a real breath of fresh air when you get bogged down in management stuff. When I graduated I had a very specific vision of Sheffield. It was where I’d studied, where I’d played and was important to me as a place. Now, the geography of the city is very different to me. I see the city by what communities we’ve been involved with, and the people there that are local champions for that initiative or that charity. They are the people who will have a knock on effect for the next generation that are coming along to stand up and take action in their community. It makes you think differently about what life is and changes your impression of the city. If I didn’t do the job I did I would have a very different view of the city I am sure.
What does the future hold for your department?
All good stuff; more of the same and lots of it. Every year we set new targets and ask ourselves how we can do better and what will stand out this year? We are always trying to improve. For this forthcoming year our target is to raise more money and get more people involved. We’ve yet to set the definitive targets but history shows us that we can improve year on year.
Last year, with the building work on the Students’ Union building, we thought we’d take a hit on numbers. So we thought it was pretty bold to set the target to say that numbers will remain static. In fact we did better than that and volunteer numbers rose 7%. I think that shows us we need to continue to be bold and just go for it.