A WEEK of activities is being held to encourage students to become community volunteers.

The Oxford Hub - Oxford University's student volunteering project - was launched at the beginning of the year.

Among the activities on offer during the week, which runs until Saturday, will be a charity cocktail crawl, taster days in the homeless, conservation and youth sectors, and a mask-making workshop for the Cowley Road Carnival.

Student volunteers president Claire Sexton, an undergraduate at Linacre College, said: "We want to give people an idea of what kind of opportunities are open to them and hopefully inspire them.

"We have had quite a lot of interest both from students and from a lot of community organisations about where student volunteers are needed and what they could be doing.

"We want to encourage engagement with the community and in the long term improve relationships bet- ween the local community and the university."

So far, the hub, based in Cowley Road, has supplied volunteers to a soup kitchen and to a number of homeless charities.

Rob Massam, 23, has been volunteering at the Gatehouse, a homeless drop-in centre, in St Michael's Street.

He said: "At Oxford, the academic experience can be quite insular but volunt- eering means you can meet real people and gain insight into what life is all about."

The mask-making workshop, on Saturday, is at the Shotover View Day Centre, in Horspath Road, between 11am and 3pm and youngsters in the city are invited to go along and make masks for the carnival.

For more information, visit oxfordhub.org