Throughout the past eighteen months, Student Hubs has been working on our inclusion strategy, exploring more ways in which we can diversify our work, support inclusion and accessibility, and create focused goals for this work. Equality, diversity and inclusion has always been at the heart of our approach, and in the last eighteen months we have worked to introduce and pilot new initiatives across our team to increase our impact.
One aspect of this approach we are excited to launch today focuses on the use of this blog, and how we create more platforms for student voice in our work. As a result, Student Hubs are happy to announce that we are taking proposals for future blog posts as a paid opportunity for students to write for us, and share their views.
We are paying students for this opportunity as we want to make it accessible for as many students as possible. We value your time, opinions, and input, and want to provide fair compensation for these efforts on behalf of us and our blog.
Logistics and blog creation
Key information about this opportunity includes:
- You do not need to be a part of our Hub network to take up this role. We welcome any UK student to get in touch, just as our webinars remain free and accessible for any student.
- We welcome proposals by our Hub alumni, although do note as we have limited budget for these opportunities, we may prioritise student authors.
- This is a paid opportunity, with the blog author being paid £40 by Student Hubs for the creation and publication of their piece. Students will be paid upon completion and publication.
- This opportunity only extends at this time to our national blog at studenthubs.org, it does not include our local Hub webpages’ blogs.
- In order to apply, you will need to follow the instructions below.
Our Partnerships and Development Director Fiona will be supporting you in writing and editing the piece, and content and scope will be pre-agreed before the piece is written. We would expect 2-3 meetings/calls to take place across the process to first hear more about the idea, agree the blog piece’s scope, and check in about the final piece. We may have more meetings/calls than this if required.
Submitting your idea
All blog writers need to submit a proposal through our form which can be found here. Even if you have questions, we would recommend completing this form in the first instance, as there is space for you to ask for support or input.
We are open to a range of topics and ideas. You might want to write a piece about your experience volunteering, engaging the community, the impact of the pandemic, social or environmental action, or to align with a national topic of conversation (e.g. Student Volunteering Week, awareness days, weeks or month topics).
We don’t need a full outline at proposal stage, only a sense of what core themes and topics your blog will cover, and a rough idea on the type of content you would like to write. We are also happy for students to choose whether they want their name published alongside the article, or if they would prefer to be anonymous.
Timelines
We are aiming to publish three paid blogs by July, which means we may not be able to accept all submissions. We will get in touch with all applicants to confirm whether we would like to hear more about your idea or whether it may not be right at this time for us.
If you would be interested in writing a paid blog for Student Hubs, complete our Register Your Interest form with your contact details and initial ideas for the piece, and we will get in touch if we would like to find out more.
We are excited to see your proposals and hope to see some excellent submissions launching on the blog shortly!
About our social action Zine [Added on 17/03/2022]
We wanted to add a section to this blog to have a space where we discussed our decision to ask for voluntary artistic and creative contributions for our Student Hubs Zine. Providing equity to opportunities for our students to use our platform is really important to us, which is why we introduced our paid blogs initiatives (and we expect the first blog to be released in April!). But fundamentally, our ask for Zine contributions cannot be paid opportunities, due to the nature of its format and the reason why we’re creating the Zine.
Our Hub Zine is being created primarily as a fundraiser. Fundraisers help us to raise money for our work, supporting our existing initiatives and enabling us to make change at a local level, but they also raise awareness and are an opportunity to engage with our networks (and others) in a way we wouldn’t usually. As this is a fundraising activity, we have to limit the costs to ensure the activity is successful, especially as there will be printing and postage costs which we need to factor into our fundraising goals.
We thought carefully about this in the decision to launch a Zine and want to be transparent about our decisions around different opportunities. It’s not standard for zine contributors to be paid (it’s usually a voluntary activity, which individuals do because they’re passionate about it and want to engage with it as a form of social protest), but we wanted to look at this critically alongside our values as an organisation. We want to support our creative contributors as well as our wider audience to engage with us on this campaign so they understand what their piece is helping us achieve, and how their contribution supports our fundraising activities.
If you would like to discuss this with us in further detail, we would recommend getting in touch with us or your local Hub team for more information.