Wednesday 13-02-2019 - 00:00

It’s National Student Volunteering Week!

Today we’re highlighting our student volunteers who put their time aside to help to run your clubs and societies. We asked Beatrice Bartilucci to tell us about her experience volunteering as Vice President of the Lancaster University Ballroom Dancing Society (LUBDS):

‘I have found volunteering as a member of the executive of a society to be a very rewarding activity. Even though helping to run a society does require dedicating a substantial number of hours to it each week, being able to successfully offer our members a wide-ranging selection of activities and seeing their progress and improvement through the terms makes it worthwhile. ‘We organise weekly lessons with a professional Ballroom and Latin dance instructor, with the aim of helping our members to not only learn different dance techniques, but also to create dance routines they can use at competitions and shows. We also have two weekly sessions that we run ourselves. The first one is Offbeat: this is a fun non-ballroom routine we take to competitions. The second is a practice session, in which we help couples perfect their routines, explain steps and figures taught in class and show them competition etiquette. We also organise private lessons and intensive workshops, especially in the run up to Roses.

‘As Vice President of LUBDS, I help run all of the events listed above. My weekly schedule usually consists of the following: I attend between 8 and 10 hours of lessons each week, I supervise at socials and I participate in an additional hour-long team meeting with members of the executive to review our progress and plan future activities. Due to the fact that I have been dancing for over fifteen years, I usually help our members to master the steps learnt in class and to go through their competition routines. This year, I also helped choreograph the Offbeat routine and taught it to a group of 15 students over the course of Michaelmas and early Lent Term.

‘One of the biggest events in our event calendar is our Annual Charity Showcase. It consists of a big show organised in collaboration with nearly every performing arts society on campus, with all the proceeds going to charities. It requires a lot of hard work as it involves lots of people from different societies and also because it is composed of lots of different sections. For example, LUBDS has to prepare an opening and a closing dance, we also provide ‘professionals’ to campus ‘celebrities’ for our own version of Strictly Come Dancing and we choreograph accompanying dances to the Mini-Musical. This year, I contributed to the choreographing of routines and to the managing of the schedule on the day of the show. This year, the show attracted an audience of roughly 260 people, and we raised £1850.

‘Volunteering as part of a society has definitely been an invaluable part of my university experience. I have really enjoyed being part of such a supportive team and making lots of new friends. By working within the executive in the running of the society, I have gained a lot of new skills that will be useful for my future career. Even though it is hard work, I find it to be a very gratifying job as I get to help people learn how to dance and I get to watch their progress and successes throughout the year and at competitions.’

If you’re interested in finding out more about Lancaster University Ballroom Dancing Society you can check out their Facebook here – you can also find an album of all of the pictures from their recent Charity Showcase here.