What is it?
The Consultancy Challenge is a week-long volunteering initiative delivered by Students' Union UCL at the end of Term Three and open to all current UCL students. It's run in collaboration between staff in Students' Union UCL and UCL Careers with host staff in London-based community projects.
Be the first to know when applications open for 2025 by signing up for our Volunteering Newsletter! We'll be opening applications during Term Two.
In the meantime if you've got any questions about the challenge please get in touch with our Volunteering Manager.
What did the Consultancy Challenge look like last year?
The 2024 Consultancy Challenge took place the week after the end of Term Three (Monday 10 June - Friday 14 June 2024) and involved 48 undergraduate, 31 Masters and 27 PhD students (a total of 107 students) selected out of a pool of 238 applicants and matched with 12 London-based community projects – deploying project management and consultancy skills developed at our training ahead of the week to find innovative and sustainable ways for their host organisation to overcome a particular business-problem worked up into a week-long challenge (such as a lack of volunteers, funding, or of a reliable database).
The challenge was made possible by funding received from the Student Life Strategy fund through Students' Union UCL and additional funding received specifically to support PhD student engagement from UCL Organisational Development.
The 12 London-based charities in 2024 who hosted our student project teams for the week were: The Ascension Trust - Bridgewatch; Bright Futures UK; The British Red Cross; Democracy Volunteers; Enable CIC; Fulham Good Neighbours; IAmI Ltd (IamIrish); KEEN London; L'Arche UK; ReachOut2All CIC; Starfish Greathearts Foundation and The New Black Film Collective.
Each host agreed to allocate sufficient staff time and resources in-kind ahead of and during the Challenge Week to give our volunteers the best experience possible – and received a small grant of £250 from us to enact the solutions our student volunteers came up with during the week.
After training on consultancy skills and project management in the last week of term, the Challenge Week began on the Monday with an icebreaker session led by each host organisation – outlining their project in full, timings for the week, connecting their projects to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals and clarifying reporting expectations for the project.
Each team spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday working on the projects with their organisation hosts. Friday was spent back at UCL – with a reflection session for all student volunteers to reflect on their learning, skills development and impact.
Following the session and a break, the 12 project groups were tasked with presenting their findings and final report to all participants, hosts and a judging panel. At the end of the plenary presentations the group judged to have delivered the best project were allocated an additional £500 for their host organisation to enact their solutions. This was followed by a formal announcement of the winning group at a reception and a wrap up of the week.
