Kitchener-Waterloo Student Volunteer Opportunities

Welcome to the KW SVO blog! I am very excited to share this project with you and I thank you for taking the time to check it out. My name is Christine and I am the creator of KW SVO (Kitchener-Waterloo Student Volunteer Opportunities). The purpose of KW SVO is to help educate high school students living in the KW region about volunteering.

I visit different organisations in the region who take student volunteers and I bring a camera. We take pictures, film a tour and film interviews. Then I take all of the footage and make them into videos that I post to Youtube. I do this because it gives students a good visual on a location so that they can assess the atmosphere and determine whether or not it is right for them, and I try to get answers to all of the questions that you would like the answers to. I try to make volunteering easy. I know that sometimes people don’t follow through with something, because they can’t find enough information on it. I’m trying to help fix that problem with volunteering  – hopefully SVO will be able to give you enough information to decide whether or not you would like to volunteer at a certain organisation.

There are three main parts to SVO. The first is my Youtube channel (www.youtube.com/KitchenerWaterlooSVO). All of my videos are located there and you can watch and scan through them to find the information that you are looking for. The next part is this blog (www.kwsvo.blogspot.com). Here I write up blog posts about all of the featured volunteer opportunities, I list their contact information and I put the videos up as well. If you are looking for all of the information in one place, this blog is the best place for that, because it connects everything. The last part is my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/KWSVO). I will post volunteer updates on this page and try to connect you to neat events that are going on in the community.  

If you decide to try and use KW SVO to find a volunteer opportunity, then there’s a certain path I would recommend taking. First I would watch the “Intro” video of a place that sounds like it might fit you well. If you don’t feel that the organisation is for you after watching the video, then maybe try a different one. If you’re still interested, then check out the “Q&A” video for the organisation. I ask pretty much the same questions at each interview. Some of the videos can get a little long, so if you are really just looking for the answer to one question, then feel free to scan through the video and find the question you want answered (I put all of the questions in subtitles at the bottom of the video as they are asked, to help make this a little easier). If you then decide that you would like to volunteer at the organisation or if you are looking for more information, I would recommend coming to this blog (if you’re not already here), and it should be able to help you out. Information that wasn’t in the videos is probably in a blog post, and if not, then the contact information that you need to get them answered is here as well. I also post the information that you need to apply to become a volunteer on this blog.

I will update KW SVO as frequently as possible. So, if you are looking for a volunteer position and SVO is not giving you anything good, check back again in a little while, because maybe the next opportunity I post will be perfect for you!

There are many reasons for students to volunteer and one of the biggest ones is the fact that you need 40 community service hours in order to graduate from high school! Other benefits of volunteering include getting experience, learning about potential jobs, making your resume look better, and of course you’ll probably feel good if you can help somebody else out. These are some of the main benefits, in my mind, of volunteering, but there are many more!

The last thing that I wanted to say is that I would love your feedback! I’m just starting this and I’m not always sure what I’m doing! If I am asking the wrong questions, or filming the wrong things, or posting unusable information, whatever it may be, I would like to hear about it! I really want this to actually be useful, so your feedback would be great. So feel free to comment on Youtube, or here – anywhere you can! Also, if you know of a place where I should film or if you would like to tell me about your experience volunteering, I would love to hear about it!

Thank you all for reading this blog and checking SVO out. Volunteering can be a really great and fun way to spend your time and I hope that KW SVO can help you to find the organisation where volunteering is all that it could be for you!  

Here's the WWWWWHO? (Who What When Where Why How Other)/Introduction video for KW SVO: