The holiday season is the time of year when everyone wants to give back and help others. Bellevue College has many resources you can utilize for volunteering.
BC makes finding volunteer opportunities easier through the RISE Learning Institute. The Research Innovation Service Experiential Learning Institute (RISE) helps teachers, students and the overall BC community by offering multiple programs. One of the programs offered is Community-Engaged and Civic Education. In this students can see what classes to take for service-learning. These are regular classes offered at BC that offer “transformational learning” which can be applied to direct volunteering service-learning, project-based service-learning, community-based research, civic education and action, community economic engagement and philanthropy.
In this array of opportunities is BC in the Community, which offers connections with roughly 175 non-profit and government agencies for students to volunteer at which can help them build their service resumes. By building up hours, students can get badges which can be displayed in their resumes. The badges include bronze for 25 hours, silver for 50 hours and gold for 100 hours of service. You can see agencies and opportunities you can volunteer for in the portal. Agencies are organizations while opportunities are more specific volunteer events that are ongoing.
The first step in using this platform would be to login through the button at the top of the portal page. You will sign into your BC login and provide your birthdate and an emergency contact, which will lead you to your account. On your dashboard, you can see volunteer hours, impact value, opportunity responses, events RSVP’d and agencies fanned, which gives you an overall look at your service resume. Next you will want to personalize your profile by pressing the icon with your initials at the top. This leads to a page where you can pin causes and interests which will help focus your volunteer opportunities. You will also want to edit your profile to let prospective organizations know more about you. This is also the area where you can provide your availability. From there you can start searching by clicking the opportunities or volunteer page. For more questions about the program, you can reference the guide.
There are many other volunteer opportunities presented by BC. The Disability Resource Center helps disabled students and offers volunteer opportunities. You can volunteer at BC’s art gallery and learn from the current artist. If you are interested in caring for the environment, check out BC’s garden club and office of sustainability, which puts on events such as the Winter Holiday Crafting Event happening Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. Lastly, to help the homeless and reduce waste, BC has the Bags to Bedrolls Project.
