Durham University: Bringing festive cheer across the City

Many hands make light work
We’re proud to support our staff and students to undertake volunteering. Since January, staff have dedicated 1,391 hours through our staff volunteering scheme.

This month, some of these hours have been dedicated to:

Making 1,500 festive crafts which have been donated to local charities for them to sell at Christmas fairs or give to their service users as a gift.
Supporting Feeding Families, a charity based in North East England that provides Christmas hampers to families in the local area, by collecting items for food parcels.
Continuing to support the Durham Foodbank on a monthly basis by sorting and packing food donations.
This month has also seen the return of our Christmas Wish Tree, a two-week campaign where we invite staff, students and, for the first time, members of the local community, to give donations or physical gifts for chosen charities.

This year we supported Moving on Durham and Durham Foodbank. Dozens of presents were donated and over £400 raised.

Setting time aside
And it’s not just our staff who have been supporting the local community, our students have been doing their bit too.

In the previous academic year, 2020-2021, our students completed 10,000 hours of volunteering. Many of these hours were dedicated during lockdown restrictions and our students had to think of other ways to support the community.

They conducted online tutoring, combatted generational isolation through letter writing, and held virtual tea parties and bingo sessions.