The Imperial Volunteers Dinner

Over the past few months, my team and I have been organising an event called Pwc Presents: Volunteer Dinner; an event to celebrate the hard-work of Imperial’s volunteers, to help promote volunteering societies and to build new relationships between societies. There’s been a huge wealth of support for this new event and I hope that this dinner will help other volunteers as I hope it will help me.

As chair of a relatively new society (ICSM Connect) it’s been, at times, difficult to build up a new community. Volunteer Dinner was dreamt up as an answer to my own problems. Like many volunteering groups, the strength of our society is built on the strength of our teams and every term we’re faced with new challenges, from finding sponsorship to training. It’s easy to see other similar volunteer societies tackling the same problems yet there are very few opportunities to find out how they overcome their challenges.

Unlike sports or arts, there are no drunken Wednesday nights at the Reynolds/Metric for alcohol-induced bonding. And as much I enjoy getting drunk and could imagine myself chanting “Volunteer for old people! Volunteer for old people!” grabbing onto unfortunate nearby strangers, there’s something that just doesn’t seem right about that image. It’s not what normally springs to mind when thinking about the galas and balls usually associated with volunteering.

Volunteer Dinner is all about finding out more about each other and how we can help one another. Volunteers are a similar breed and the truth is, if you’re a student willing to give up copious hours of your time to help out others, without the need for recognition or glorification then you have a unique characteristic or virtue.

One of the promotional ideas for the Volunteer Dinner was to release a ‘Humans of New York’ style video series to Facebook entitled ‘Volunteers of Imperial’ where we’d ask two or three questions to get volunteers to chat with the camera. Out of this we found almost every volunteer had very similar answers: I do it because I love helping people and being there to listen to their stories and their hardships. I do it for my team, working together to face worthwhile challenges. I just enjoy volunteering, there’s nothing more to it.

So, if you’re a volunteer, or if you’re interested in finding out more about various volunteering societies and meeting the committee of these societies, then this a dinner for you. We’ve got a really nice venue (Double Tree by Hilton hotel), some great musical entertainment, some prizes to give out and a really awesome menu. Plus, support from PwC’s sponsorship is letting us keep it cheap. So please consider coming and I hope to see you there!