By Dora Ashe
There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with being a politically engaged university student. You spend seminars dissecting the details of global inequality, debate geopolitics over a pint, and scroll past headline after headline about crises unfolding thousands of miles away. Yet you walk away with nowhere to put that knowledge except back into another essay. The gap between understanding a problem and actually doing something about it can feel huge. InterVol Bristol exists to close it.
I volunteered with Bristol Volunteering for Development Abroad (BVDA) in my second year, so when the opportunity to become student contact for InterVol cropped up (the registered charity BVDA is now being absorbed into), I jumped at it. InterVol partners with universities across the UK to connect students with meaningful volunteering opportunities in their own city and beyond. This year, I'm building InterVol's first official Bristol base, largely from scratch, and I need Bristol students to help me do it! To get official SU society status by January 2027, InterVol Bristol needs at least 30 members and a full committee, no small task when it's mostly been me so far. So before I ask you to get involved, I wanted to explain why volunteering as a student has meant so much to me.
Volunteering at a self-sufficient school in Nepal last summer, and with my local National Park Authority this summer, showed me just how much you get back from it. Whether it was conducting biodiversity surveys, helping manage track erosion in a monsoon-hit area, or sorting hundreds donated books into a working library for rural Nepalese schoolchildren, working alongside people who truly cared about what they were doing gave me a way to put my energy somewhere real with no experience or serious time commitment required.
I’m working to bring a food relief project to Bristol focused on combating food poverty as well as supporting refugees and migrants. Our first exciting partnership is with the North Bristol & South Glos food bank, where students will have the opportunity to help at their warehouse, sorting donations and packing emergency food parcels. InterVol has worked with Care4Calais in Manchester and Birmingham, and hopes to partner with similar charities delivering essential aid and everyday support to displaced people. Looking further ahead, I am also exploring the possibility of a volunteer project abroad next summer, in keeping with InterVol's long history of sending student teams overseas.
The scale of what InterVol is responding to is hard to overstate. By the end of 2024, 123.2 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced by conflict, persecution or violence (the twelfth year in a row that figure has risen!). Hunger is rising alongside it. The World Food Programme estimates that 318 million people across 68 countries are currently facing acute food insecurity. Closer to home, the Trussel Trust reported that in 2024, 14.1 million people were food insecure, with 6.5 million turning to charitable food providers in the UK.
But volunteering isn't just about the difference you make to others. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Population Economics found that job applicants who listed volunteering experience were 7.3 per cent more likely to receive a positive response from employers than those who didn't. The commitment and initiative volunteering demonstrates genuinely registers with employers, especially at a time when standing out in the graduate job market has never felt harder.
Emily MacLean
Since 2003, InterVol's student volunteers have contributed over 100,000 hours and £250,000 in funding to community development and poverty-reduction projects worldwide. Now it's time for Bristol students to add to that.
We're recruiting now! Both general volunteers and committee members as we work towards InterVol Bristol becoming an officially recognised SU society by January 2027. Whether you can commit a few hours, want to help shape a future summer project abroad, or want to get involved at committee level, there's a role for you.
Featured image: Unsplash / Joel Muniz
Will you take part in InterVol Bristol?
