Full Set of Guides

The Good Practice Guides presented here are a suite of guides for the different stakeholders involved in student volunteering. These are guides for good practice, not best practice, as our research has identified many successful models of student volunteering. These guides have been developed based on an extensive literature review, a desk audit of all Australian universities and a series of in-depth interviews with students, university staff, alumni, volunteer-host organisations and volunteer peak body representatives.

Each of these guides can be read individually but they also work together. There are guides for students, university senior managers, student volunteer program managers and coordinators (within a university), host organisations and employers.

  • Students – the student guide outlines the benefits from volunteering and provides advice on how to find the right volunteer opportunity.
  • University program managers – provides macro and micro level guidelines for developing and managing a student volunteer program.
  • Senior university staff – the senior university staff guide delivers insights into successful student volunteer program and outlines trends in university student volunteering.
  • Host organisations – this guide for organisations that seek to host student volunteers provides an overview of student volunteering for host organisations and seeks to dispel myths about student volunteering.
  • Potential employers – the employers guide outlines the potential benefits from recruiting graduates with volunteer experience and offers advice on how to identify whether the graduate’s volunteer experience was valuable.

There are also two conceptual guides:

  • Terminology – this provides clarification on the diverse terminology used to describe student volunteering. We also outline activities that the project team do not consider to be volunteering.
  • Learning - which reviews the ways in which volunteering can help students learn and can complement the curriculum.

Full Set of the Good Practice Guides
Full Set of the Concept Guides


Thank you to Volunteering Western Australia for the use of the images on this web page.

Volunteering to Learn Volunteering WA Murdoch University Edith Cowan University Macquarie University University of Western Australia Curtin University

M.Paull@murdoch.edu.au