4000 Central Florida, Suite 208 Orlando, Florida 32817 (407) 823-3318 vucf@ucf.edu http://osi.ucf.

edu/vucf/

About Volunteer UCF

As the demand for volunteerism became a need in the University of Central Florida community, Volunteer UCF came to be. Founded on the premise of promoting civic engagement and education on various social issues, Volunteer UCF was created in June 2009 by UCF student, Amy Bonillia. In May 2009, Bonillia organized a cleanup at Lake Claire as a class service project. Motivated by the turnout from the cleanup, Bonillia wanted to participate in more on-campus volunteer opportunities with UCF students. She soon realized there werent many opportunities presented by UCF. Bonillia decided to start a service club called Volunteer at UCF. Volunteer at UCF started as a simple club on UCF that met on Tuesdays at UCF. Students met up to organize local volunteer events. Volunteer at UCF made connections with local nonprofits such as Adult Literacy League, March of Dimes and Boys Town that presented various volunteer opportunities for students. After collaborating with nonprofit, Food Harvest of Central Florida, Volunteer at UCF gained attention from UCF president, John Hitt, who noticed the reception the group was receiving in the community. Hitt approached Volunteer at UCF and presented the opportunity for Volunteer UCF to become an official UCF agency. As an agency, Volunteer at UCF would receive funding from the Student Government Association as well as an office space in the Office of Student Involvement. Volunteer at UCF accepted Hitts offer and changed its name to Volunteer UCF. Volunteer UCF soon became a commodity at UCF. In its first month as an agency, Volunteer UCF organized a meal packaging event with Feeding Children Everywhere that had more than 35 student volunteer and received media coverage from local news stations. Today, Volunteer UCF serves as an integral volunteer component of the UCF community as it is one of a few agencies that exclusively focus on volunteer events for students. Volunteer UCF specializes in environmental cleanups, fundraisers, donation drives and feeding the needy. Volunteer UCF hosts an annual event called Knights Give Back. Knights Give Back is a day of service that has volunteers perform in several service activities on campus such as lake cleanups, book recycling and painting old classrooms. Currently, Volunteer UCF has more than 300 active members and has collaborated with close to 200 organizations. Volunteer UCF has more than 110 events planned for 2014 and seeks to expand the agency to remote UCF campuses.