Volunteering, Leadership & Development

Service and Leadership Award

Every student at Hope can earn a Service and Leadership Award alongside their degree. It recognises your extra-curricular activities, places you at the heart of your community, and enhances your employability by showing employers that you are committed, dedicated and versatile.

You can complete the SALA alongside your degree, you could do it all in one year or spread it across three - as long as it's finished before you graduate. You'll develop skills and abilities that you can use in your future career and completing the award whilst studying demonstrates that you are committed, determined and versatile.

Our Service and Leadership Award consists of three elements:

Volunteering

You'll need to do a minimum of 80 hours across two different projects. You can arrange your own volunteering or speak to our Careers & Employability Team who will help you find a local voluntary organisation. If you'd like to combine travel and SALA you can opt to volunteer abroad on our Global Hope programme.

Already found your volunteering organisation?

In order for us to approve your volunteering hours we need to have the organisation registered as a partner with SALA. You can help to speed things up by emailing SALA@hope.ac.uk with a name and email address for your supervisor/line manager at the organisation. Once we've registered an organisation other students can volunteer there as well, so you're not only helping connect volunteers to the organisation, you're connecting other students too!

If you need help securing a volunteering placement you can head to the Volunteering Opportunities page or drop into the Employability Hub for a chat with one of the team.

Personal development

Constantly developing and gaining skills is what sets leaders apart from the crowd. The Core Talks and Skills Development modules will help you achieve practical skills that are valued by employers. The best part is you can choose the skills and development topics yourself, meaning it's tailored towards your leadership and career goals.

Reflective portfolio

This is the final task to gain your award and is a chance to reflect on and share your experience. Your final portfolio can be anything from a video diary to an essay.

If you're completing the Service and Leadership Award, keep an eye out on the Events page(https://hope.jobteaser.com/en/events/ ) on JobTeaser for all the latest training and workshop dates.

You can manage everything SALA related from My Careers Centre, just head to the Task Manager (https://mycareerscentre.page.link/SALAtasks) to see the guidance for all of the modules, plus you can upload evidence and add notes.