Labor of Love: How to Leverage Passionate College Students to Advance your Non-Profit Project Mission
Introduction
There are talented students at every college and university looking to gain real-world experience and apply their knowledge and skills to make a meaningful impact. Although college students typically have limited experience, they can still provide tremendous value to non-profit organizations through their enthusiasm, fresh perspective, and emerging knowledge-base and skill-set. It’s also a low risk option to bring in talent to a non-profit and potentially identify future interns and employees.
Over the past five years, 33 Buckets has gained extensive experience working with college students. We have engaged 40+ other students through various college courses and programs, and have also worked closely with 7 student interns. It has been a very positive experience for the growth of our organization, particularly in marketing and fundraising as well as research and development.
We have had students coordinate fundraising campaigns, write blogs and monthly newsletters, update our website, and even design our annual report. We have also helped students support the development of water treatment technologies, our primary focus, while expanding our project portfolio to other areas such as designing and developing rainwater harvesting and aquaculture systems. We have also had one student who collaborated with us on a thesis project related to refining and assessing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) education workshops.
Students greatly benefit from these experiences in many ways such as gaining real-world experience, further developing their skill-set, strengthening their resume, gaining course or thesis credit. You can review the reflections from our 33 Buckets interns featured in our July blog post to get a more tangible picture of what students have gained from their internship experience.
There are challenges involved with engaging college students though! Just like any other new hire, it takes time, energy, training, and continuous mentorship/support (especially early on) for students to understand expectations and get to a point where they can support organizational projects in meaningful ways. The purpose of this blog post is to provide recommendations on how to recruit passionate college students and maximize their abilities to support the advancement of your organization’s project work.
Recommendation #1: Leverage University Programs to Recruit Motivated Students
Ideally, you want to work with high-achieving, driven students that have the ability to take initiative, self-regulate their learning, and are comfortable with a certain level of ambiguity. A great way to start is to research classes and programs at nearby institutions within various disciplines that are a good fit for the skill-set you are looking for. In our experience, it is usually best to target project-based learning-focused classes and programs, especially those that are optional or offered to a select group of students.
For example, within Arizona State University (ASU) there is a Barrett Honors College which houses many of the highest-achieving students. The Barrett Honors College has a Global Resolve program in which students work on real-world, global projects with a clear social impact. This has been an outstanding program in which 33 Buckets has been able to collaborate with 20+ students over the past two years to support the development and current implementation of a trout hatchery within a community in Peru called Totora
Another example is we have worked closely with the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program over the last 3 years at ASU and have engaged 35+ students in the design of a smart chlorination system that will substantially improve how disinfection of water is currently done in a number of rural communities near Cusco, Peru.
We also recommend utilizing existing listservs used by various academic departments to disseminate information and opportunities to their students. For example, the Barrett Honors Digest and Engineering Inner Circle listservs have helped us identify all of our outstanding student interns.
Recommendation #2: Provide Clear Project Expectations
It’s imperative to provide clear expectations for your students. Spend time upfront clearly detailing the purpose of your project including project needs, goals, and what success would look like. If it’s your first time working with a student intern or offering a class project, perhaps choose a lower priority project that can still have a significant impact on your organization if it’s successfully completed.
For example, the first project one of our marketing interns worked on was creating a new Annual Report. We were able to provide the intern with an example from the previous year and had several discussions on how we expected and how we could improve upon the previous year’s version. Specific details were discussed from which program to use to create the design, what sections to include, who could support writing each section, what the ratio of words/pictures should be, and a timeline for completion. Having a defined project with clear expectations greatly helped this intern get off to a great start and led to a great final deliverable for us!
Recommendation #3: Provide Mentorship & Support
Once you’ve recruited motivated students and outlined clear expectations and goals, you must empower your students to produce high quality work through mentorship and support. Providing proper guidance for your student team members will make all the difference in creating meaningful progress with your organization and mission. Investing adequate time and effort into a mentorship structure will pay off many times over in the long run.
We recommend dedicating one or more individuals to regularly communicate with students to ensure they have the resources to continue making progress towards the goals that you have set with them. Often, students have less experience directly relevant to your work; therefore, they may require more mentorship and guidance in the early stages. However, students tend to learn rapidly, gain confidence, and eventually be able to contribute beyond your initial expectations. View it as an investment that will pay off over time.
When building student teams, you should ensure that there is an accountability structure in place in which students report their progress, define their upcoming tasks/goals, and communicate any obstacles they’re facing. We’ve found that having more experienced team members interacting in weekly or bi-weekly meetings is crucial in empowering your student team members. We’ve also found that intermittent one-on-one meetings allow students to more adequately articulate their experience thus far and their plans moving forward. Within our organization, many of our projects are long-term and often challenging, tasks that can be overwhelming for even experienced professionals. Breaking down these large projects into sub-deliverables creates a clear path in which students can see the logical progression of the tasks at hand.
Recommendation #4: Feedback & Evaluation
Consistently collecting and providing feedback on your students' experience is a fantastic way to rapidly improve your organization’s ability to leverage student teams. Your students will likely appreciate the opportunity to improve and provide helpful feedback for your organization in return.
Be intentional about giving feedback so that students engage in continuous learning and improvement over time. Create opportunities for both verbal feedback, through virtual or in-person meetings, and written feedback through brief surveys. While group feedback is important, some students may feel more comfortable providing/receiving feedback in a one-on-one or written format. Don’t forget to provide constructive feedback in a positive manner so that your students know they’re doing quality work and are appreciated by your organization.
Setting up a structure for continuous feedback and evaluation of both your students and your organization is an excellent way to ensure that your efforts are working as intended and to identify areas of improvement.