What a beautifully busy summer it has been for Winchester Hub! If you were curious about what we got up to in the summer, you have come to the right place! In today's blog you can learn about how we responded to COVID and continued our campaigns, programmes and fundraising. Overall having a successful summer!!

Here is an overview of what we have done since March, and how we have made a difference in these difficult times of the pandemic:

Give it a Go

Give it a Go, if you do not know already, is one of our programmes that run one off volunteering events to provide an easy way to make a positive difference, even when you are busy with studies and other commitments. They ran several campaigns in the summer to help keep students engaged! One of which was the Random Acts of Kindness Campaign this involved recruiting and supporting students to do random acts of kindness to help support people during COVID with the hashtag #RemoteGIAG

As demonstrated in the Instagram post above, we suggested a few ideas:

  • Do a food shop for someone in self-isolation: whilst you do yours - only go shopping when necessary!
  • Check-in with a high risk individual: Do you know someone in your neighbourhood who is high risk? Why not knock on their door and post a card to them asking how they are doing
  • Sign a petition: Check out Change.org
  • Make a care package for someone: This can be created simply with only just a few items to put a smile on someones face.

We asked volunteers to do a different social action and tag us in it to show us what they did. If you are still interested in creating a package as a random act of kindness please see government guidance here to ensure your social action is being done safely.

Wellbeing Week

For Wellbeing Week we ran several events,  such as “Tea and Chat”, where we made cards to send to people who were in isolation whilst talking about how our mental health was in Lockdown.

Another event was “Knitting Hearts” which was also a remote event where Lydia, our 2019/20 Woolly Matters coordinator, taught us how to knit hearts. We posted them to care homes (i.e. St.John’s Winchester) to give to families who couldn’t see their relatives during Lockdown.

One of our volunteers for "knitting hearts", Lorraine, stated:

Summer SIP

SIP is an abbreviation for Social Innovation Programme. This is one of our projects where university students use their initiative to address challenges in their local area through research, ideas and project development. In a team, they deal with a real-life challenge faced by a local organisation, and act as external consultants to propose and implement an innovative solution to a problem.

We ran a summer cohort of the Social Innovation Programme which specifically helped community groups that had problems arise from COVID-19. Organisations we supported were:

One of the SIP teams final presentation to their designated organisation, Wickham Community Centre

Feedback from participates was amazing! Adele, a team leader of one of our SIP teams, stated on twitter:

"An absolutely amazing experience! Leading my team to a win was just an added bonus! Can't wait to see what's in store for @WickhamCentre next and would love to continue working with them..." -Adele

Another one of our participants, Laura Tweeted:

In the end we had a total of 23 students, both current and recent graduates, whose internships had fell through from COVID. However, our programme was fully remote and a huge success!

Fundraising

Student Hubs 600km Fundraiser! The staff at Student Hub collectively aimed to walk 600km in the Month of May to raise funds for COVID response work and to keep our volunteering going.

The Student Hubs 600km Challenge explained.

We raised £2,738 overall which helped support our virtual Schools Plus and Zoom work over summer SIP. Overall we walked over 1000km all together!

Here are the results of the amount raised by the different Student Hubs Staff in the UK.

Winchester Hub raised the most out of all Student Hubs, which only called for more celebration!! Whoop whoop! Overall the Summer at Winchester Hub was busy but very impactful and successful!