If you are keen to contribute to the Untraceable University but you are not interested in or able to form or join a Thematic Action Committee, then we have a number of internal volunteer roles available where your support would be greatly appreciated and can be equally impactful. These volunteers work directly with our core team to provide a guiding role to the Thematic Action Committees, and help run the operational part of our project. Our core team is primarily based in Johannesburg (South Africa), but embraces remote work. Volunteers from any location are welcome to apply.

There are a number of areas for which we seek volunteers:

Communications and social media management

Depending on your interest, this can be a single role, or it can be split into two. The "communications" part of this role refer to institutional communication between our team and collaborators and other external stakeholders. This primarily involves e-mail support for the members of our Thematic Action Committees, who have practical and operational questions about the activities and the materials they produce, and handling queries that come in through the website. The other part of this role relates to the management of our social media accounts. This involves the production of materials (visuals and text) for our different channels, in collaboration with the core team and in response to recent events and achievements. Another medium-term goal is to set up a social media strategy, which takes a more holistic view to our social media engagement and looks at how to roll out a strategy to approach these different channels. Our social media engagement has only recently been started and there is a lot of room in this position to take a steering role.

Our communications and social media roll-out is either in English or Spanish. We seek either two volunteers, or a volunteer that speaks both languages.

Multimedia

There are a number of multimedia areas where we can use additional support. The main areas include:

• Sound editing: our podcast series is currently under development and there are a large number of sound editing tasks available related to the creation of individual episodes as well as the preparation of shorter audio clips for wider distribution. This work is done in collaboration with our podcast hosts and producer.
• Video editing: videos such as our introduction video are incredibly useful in sharing our ideas with a wider audience. We seek to expand our capacity to develop more video material for external use.
• Graphic design: we produce a variety of documents and materials that are shared with our stakeholders as well as the general public. These range from presentations and reports to social media images and website design.

People with experience in any of the aforementioned areas can make a great difference in our ability to create high-quality multimedia materials. We seek volunteers in these areas that speak either English or Spanish.

Event management

In the second half of 2025 we are rolling out a large number of events. These include webinars, workshops, presentations, guest lectures, and management of cohorts of students (online course). Sometimes we need to provide support to events organised by Thematic Action Committees (mostly around their Education and Outreach activities), and other times these are institutional events set up by our core team. Independently from the nature of these events, there are a lot of logistical operations happening in the background, and we can use additional support from July-November 2025.

Many of these events take place remotely, and if they are not then our partner organisations take care of the physical preparations. But we are often the primary responsible for managing guests, speakers, and general communications around these events. This is a lot of e-mailing and keeping track of all the moving parts for each event.

Anybody with experience in event management or general planning can be of great help in setting up these events. Our events take place either in English or Spanish. We seek either two volunteers, or a volunteer that speaks both languages.

Interested?

Great! We would love to hear from you and discuss the options. Please contact us and let us know what role you are interested in. Let us what your experience is, and if there is something specific that you would like to get out of this role. For students we can provide documentation if they require this for class credits. If you are keen to help in other ways not described above, feel free to reach out and we can discuss the options.