Jan 13, 2016

Give the Gift of Time: Longhorn Center for Community Engagement Launches 50K Service Hours Campaign

Interested in volunteering at a local nonprofit, but not sure where to start? The Longhorn Center for Community Engagement (LCCE) can help. A list of volunteer opportunities can be found on utvolunteers.org, UT’s service database powered by Austin startup GivePulse. This volunteer management database streamlines the volunteering process, offering a range of resources that benefit both nonprofits and volunteers—from tracking service hours to coordinating group efforts to calculating the economic impact of a service event. Through utvolunteers.org, the LCCE is tracking its impact on dozens of local nonprofits. The goal is to reach 50,000 hours of service during the 2015-16 academic year—and double that amount by next year. We caught up with two students who are helping the LCCE surpass this university-wide goal. Both are leaders of the UT Service Scholars, a partnership of the LCCE and the LBJ School of Public Affairs that requires students to complete 300 hours of community service prior to graduation. Name: Abby Hull Major: Biology Senior, College of Natural Sciences Activities and Programs: UT Service Scholars President, Special Olympics event volunteer, Soles4Souls chapter member and volunteer Where do you volunteer? I’ve done most of my volunteering with the Special Olympics, and recently I started volunteering at Dell Children’s Hospital. I benefitted from playing a lot of sports growing up, so I really want help people get involved in sports and activities at a young age. How does utvolunteers.org make volunteering more convenient? I really like that it eliminates a lot of paperwork. I no longer have to remember to bring a sheet to someone to verify my hours at a service event. I can do that all online. It’s so easy to log in and record my impacts, get contact info from people and create events that people can sign up for.  If you’re interested in volunteering for an event, all you have to do is go to the website and it covers all the details.