Is your charity facing a challenge that you’d like assistance with?

The Community Engagement Programme supports teams of LSE student volunteer consultants answer project briefs for charities. The next programme runs 15 January – 20 March 2024.

Previous projects have included: 

• Devising new fundraising strategies for a charity
• Producing an evaluation model for one of a charity’s programmes
• Determining how a charity can better support a demographic with whom it works

• Assessing the efficacy of a charity’s events programme
• Helping to develop an environmental policy for a charity
• Identifying how a charity can attract younger audiences and volunteers
• Identifying how diversity can be promoted within a charity’s volunteer network
• Conducting a literature review on a topic to inform a charity’s advocacy work

• Evaluating a charity’s shift to online service provision (during COVID-19)
• Identifying how a charity can best manage its hybrid work environment post-COVID

Depending on the project, your assigned team will conduct literature reviews, secondary research, surveys, interviews, focus groups or quantitative data analysis to produce actionable recommendations your charity can take forward.

You’ll catch up with the team assigned to your charity every other week.  Each team will also receive support from the LSE Volunteer Centre, the wider LSE, and an LSE Alumni Mentor.  The LSE supports the teams by providing resources on every aspect of the project from research methodology to presenting; workshops; and research ethics and data management training.

At the same time, you’ll be involved in decisions at every step of the way.

Over the past few months, my team have worked incredibly hard on their project; they have been working in both an incredibly effective and useful way. In all meetings, they were well prepared, receptive to my thoughts, and always demonstrated a desire to understand the issues that we are facing as clearly as possible. The internal structure within the team has been clear and they worked hard to dissect the issue in order to address it as effectively as possible.

At the end of the project, we came away with a fantastic report which clearly laid out recommendations for us going forward (which they received a highly commended award for!) and both I and my Trustees feel very lucky that we got to work with such a great group of students! (Meg Haskins, London Nightline)

Charity applications to the programme are open 25 September – 15 October 2023 and can be found on CareerHub. 

If you would like to discuss your application with the LSE Volunteer Centre, please don’t hesitate to reach out at volunteer@lse.ac.uk.

___

*To apply, you’ll need your charity’s log on details for LSE CareerHub.  If your organisation does not yet have a CareerHub account, you can set one up when you apply to the programme.  Please leave time for this: CareerHub accounts will only be activated once they have been approved by the LSE, which can take a couple of days.