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HR and Campus Announcements

Volunteer Opportunities Available on NC State Website

Volunteer Opportunities

If you are looking for opportunities to volunteer, NC State’s Leadership and Civic Engagement office can help you.

Since 2018, the office has been making on- and off-campus volunteer opportunities available on a website. The office partnered with Galaxy Digital, an Asheville-based volunteer management software company, to create the site.

More than 90 organizations use the site to post volunteer opportunities. The website boasts 2,378 users. Users of the site logged 3,602 service hours last year.

UHR is a proponent of university employees spending time giving back to their communities, and we particularly want to encourage them to do so during the upcoming holidays.

The free and easy-to-use website allows users to search for opportunities in a variety of ways, including chronologically. You also can look for opportunities by type, such as outdoor, family-friendly and virtual. Users can opt to receive a notification when a specific organization posts a volunteer opportunity on the site by becoming a “fan” of that organization.

Most of the site’s users are students, but Brian Mathis, associate director of leadership and civic engagement, would like to see more staff and faculty use the site.

“We’re going through some structural changes in our office, and that’s one area that we’ve highlighted,” Mathis said. “We want to serve our community beyond just our students, even though student engagement is our primary focus area. We have great volunteer opportunities for our students as well as faculty and staff.”

Permanent, probationary and time-limited employees at NC State can request paid community service leave. Those employees can use the website to find volunteer opportunities and then find out if the ones they are interested in qualify for use of paid community service leave.

“I want to closely partner with HR to really encourage faculty and staff to use their community service leave,” Mathis said. “I’m hoping to make that a priority for myself and for my office.”

Marie Williams, associate vice chancellor for Human Resources, said her office looks forward to hearing from Mathis about how UHR and Leadership and Civic Engagement can be partners.

“UHR is a proponent of university employees spending time giving back to their communities, and we particularly want to encourage them to do so during the upcoming holidays,” Williams said. “The service website sounds like a valuable tool, and if we can use it to motivate staff and faculty to use their community service leave, we would want to explore that opportunity.”

Employees are allotted 24 hours of paid community service leave each year. As a result of COVID-19, employees have received additional hours of paid community service leave, which will expire Dec. 31. The hours granted due to COVID-19 allow employees to:

  • Request up to 36 hours of paid leave to provide tutoring or mentoring for a student in a public or nonpublic school to support virtual or hybrid instruction for at-risk students who require temporary or ongoing support to succeed academically.
  • Request up to 80 hours of expanded community service leave to volunteer at a nonprofit that serves individuals affected by the pandemic.

If you have questions regarding community service leave options, please contact your college, division or unit HR representative or University Human Resources.

For questions about the service website, contact Mathis at bjmathis@ncsu.edu or 919-513-0215.