Once you have found the right service opportunity for your course, you can submit a need response. Once you've responded to a need, you'll be able to monitor your progress toward your course goal, logging your volunteer hours as you complete the service work.

This article explains how to respond to a need, and how to ensure that your need response (and any hours submitted) are associated with a selected course and available to your course instructor. It also explains how to edit a need response, which could include switching shifts or unregistering from a need.

A Note on Terminology

The default terms for a course on a Connect site are SLM, need and agency. Your site may use different terms such as opportunity and organization (or something similar). If this is the case, your screen may not match what is shown in this article.

Responding to a Need

Once you've found the need(s) assigned to your course, you can submit a response. When you respond, the agency manager will be notified of your interest in volunteering with their agency.

To respond to a need as part of a course:

  1. Select the need you're interested in by clicking View Details to open the need-information page.

    Note: If a need has been made privately available to your user group, you'll see a "lock" icon next to the title, as shown above.

  2. On the need-information page, click Respond, located on the right-hand side of your screen.

    Note: Some needs may also have a Respond as Team option.

  3. If applicable, select the shift(s) you want to work.
  4. Click Submit Need Response.

Once you've responded to a need, the Respond button changes to read Unregister (for non-shift needs) or Manage My Responses (for shift needs). See the following section for more on editing or deleting your need responses.

Unregistering from a Need or Changing a Shift

At some point you may find that you need to change the details of a need response. If this is case, you can do so from a couple of places, depending on what you need to change. To unregister from a need:

  1. From your profile menu, click Need Responses.
    Your Volunteer Responses table lists all of your past volunteer responses.

    Note: Expired needs are shown in faded text with a gray background. You can click on any active, current need to view the need description.

  2. Find the need, and then click Unregister from the Options dropdown.
  3. Click Yes to confirm your unregistration.
    Warning: If you have already submitted volunteer hours for the need or shift from which you're unregistering, those hours will no longer appear in your hours record or on your volunteer resume.

You can also unregister from a need by opening need-information page and clicking the Unregister button.

Note: If you are a team leader, you cannot unregister from a need until you have designated another team leader. Click here to learn more.

Related Articles

Your SLM Student Guide contains additional articles on responding to needs, logging volunteer hours, and monitoring your progress toward your course's service-learning goals.