With summer coming to an end and Welcome 2020 just around the corner I asked societies to tell me what they've been getting up to virtually over summer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed hearing about how our amazing societies have adapted and come up with new and innovative ways to engage their members. Have a read of what these societies have been doing...
Birmingham Marrow:
“Birmingham Marrow are the student-run branch of the national charity Anthony Nolan, whose mission is to match individuals suffering from blood cancer or blood disorders with life-saving stem cell transplants. Birmingham Marrow promotes joining the national stem cell donor register and fundraises to help Anthony Nolan sign up new donors and carry out scientific research. Since we established, Birmingham Marrow has recruited 46 donors who have gone on to donate stem cells in life-saving procedures for people with blood cancer or blood disorders which is outstanding- UoB students save lives!
During the summer we’ve been championing our ‘Lockdown Lifesavers’ campaign. Anthony Nolan saw a huge drop in register sign-ups so to combat this we’ve been promoting the register using social media and have signed up the most new donors of any Marrow group in the country, at 69 donors and counting!
We’ve collaborated with lots of societies to promote the register to their members and followers, using fun graphics and marrow memes to encourage people to learn more about the register. The donor register unfortunately has a huge lack of diversity, leading to individuals form BAME backgrounds having just a 20% chance of finding a match compared to a 69% chance for white Europeans. We continuously raise awareness of this lack of diversity to encourage sign ups from BAME individuals, and recently won the Guild’s Diversity and Inclusion award for our efforts. At the moment we are promoting a patient appeal for a 3 year old boy named Veer who urgently needs a stem cell match but is struggling to find one due to his Indian heritage.
As well as 'Lockdown Lifesavers', we have raised over £200 hosting virtual pub quizzes and in March, we encouraged members to run 5k, donate £5 to Anthony Nolan Coronavirus relief fund and nominate 5 people to do the same; raising a further £50.
We are really looking forward to continuing this work during Welcome Week and raising awareness of charity volunteering opportunities for new students.”
Find out more about the register and how to sign up.
Esports:
Esports Society ran a Black Lives Matter Charity Stream in July, managing to raise over 1500$ across two days of streaming. Get to know the Esports society.
Nightline:
“Birmingham Nightline is a volunteer-led listening service run by students, for students. We pride ourselves on being anonymous, confidential, non-advisory and non-judgmental. Over the last few months we have:
- Won Guild Volunteering Society of the Year 2020
- Been awarded the national Nightline Association Award for Best Volunteer Welfare 2020
- Set up our remote instant messaging service
- Extended our services to BCU students
- Moved our training materials online
- Run many socials, including quizzes, Netflix parties, charades and even a virtual ball!
We provide a listening and information service for nearly 70,000 students in Birmingham, this service typically runs outside of standard wellbeing support hours. With COVID-19, we've adapted our service and have been able to run a reduced service from 20:00 onwards, involving a remote instant messaging service, alongside our normal email service.
We're a volunteering society, so rely on the generosity of others to run the service, and we're hoping to recruit some more lovely volunteers for the coming year.
For anyone interested in volunteering with us, we are setting up virtual training sessions, typically running at set weekends throughout the year. Here you'll be able to learn active listening and leadership skills that'll help you support Birmingham students.” Learn all about Nightline via their website, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Valefest:
“As ValeFest was cancelled this year, the team took the festival online, with a full day live stream of music, drama, recipes, dances, as well as other videos from Uni bands / groups and well known bands. We reached 35,346 people with it, and through donations and VF T-shirt sales from the stream, we raised an incredible £4071.99 for our charities: RSVP and Just Like Us. The stream is still up on our Facebook page if you want to watch. We also did live-streams every Friday leading up to the big day with more live music and interviews.”
Check out ValeFestival to see how you can get involved with planning ValeFest 2021!
UoB ABACUS:
“We would like to share our online fundraising event for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement we organised in collaboration with 7 other Asian societies across England. All financial contributions to the fundraiser will be donated to The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust to help fight against systemic racism for young people. The money raised will be used to fund training sessions and work experience for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to improve their career prospects, among many other things.
The virtual charitable fundraiser was in the form of a bingo-style donation card which was posted on our social media. We encouraged people to tag their friends to donate money and spread the awareness of the BLM movement. When a donation was received, the corresponding price on the card was blocked off and donations were matched by our committee members at the end of the event.
In addition, all 8 societies collaborated to make a short infographic video to raise awareness about educational and racial inequalities that exist in the UK and further generate engagement.
In summary, UoB ABACUS has hosted an educational and a meaningful, collaborative, online fundraising event for the BLM movement. We raised over 200 pounds in just the first 4 days.” Learn all about UoB ABACUS.
UOB Craft:
“Our society has been running a few virtual events on Facebook and Instagram where we’ve been encouraging our members to share anything crafty that they’ve been up to over the Summer using #uobcraft. We’ve then been sharing some of our members' creations on our stories to try and bring people together and inspire others to get creative! These also don’t necessarily have to be complicated crafts, it can be anything from baking, to sewing, to gardening, to drawing and basically anything that has an element of craft to it!!
We’ve also been doing some “Meet the Committee” type posts on our social media pages which aim to introduce each committee member and give a bit of background information on each one!” Ready to get crafty? Learn all about UOB Craft.
Watch this space for even more Student Group shout-outs!