While there are records of informal volunteering at Royal Holloway taking place in the 1970s, formal volunteering did not begin until the founding of "Royal Holloway Community Action" in the 2002-03 academic year. Community Action officially opened on Valentines Day, 14 February, in 2003 and since then thousands of students have taken part of volunteering and social action at the university.  

Our Volunteering Hub Assistants have put together History Hunt, a treasure hunt with a difference – guiding participants around campus to various locations QR codes to help them discover the secret history of volunteering, told across various locations!  The history hunt begins at the Picture Gallery and even goes down to Egham Town! All you need is a smart phone to take part. 

We are in the process of putting together an interactive timeline of volunteering that you can contribute to! If you have memories and photographs of your time volunteering then fill out our online form and we will consider adding it to the timeline.

We celebrated 20 years of Royal Holloway Community Action Volunteering and invited our alumni to join us on campus on Wednesday 15 February for an afternoon of networking in the Emily Wilding Davison building with special campus tours, Anniversary exhibition, filming memories, exlploring our College Collections Uncovered and the unveiling of London 2012 mosiac.

To celebrate 20 years of Volunteering at Royal Holloway we commissioned this piece of art from Jenny Leonard. Using information about the volunteering team about the involvement of students over two decades, Jenny put this incredible art piece together. You can see a time lapse showing the creation of this art piece on YouTube.