You will know the opportunity has been submitted for approval because the "posting status" of the opportunity and/or occurrences will be:  "This is not published and has been submitted for approval".

You'll see this on both the volunteer opportunity search page and in the opportunity detail view of any given opportunity:

Once the Opportunity and its occurrences have been published, they will have the posting status:  "This is approved and published for volunteers to sign-up".

When the end date of an occurrence has been reached (and in the case of Date and Time Specific Opportunities) there are no future approved occurrences, the posting status will be shown as "This is not published. There are no upcoming, active occurrences."  

To republish the opportunity, go to the opportunity detail page and either:

1) Add a new occurrence (for date and time specific opportunities), or

2) Edit the single occurrence for an Individually Scheduled Opportunity, and change the 'end date" to a date in the future.

Some HandsOn Connect host organizations allow some or all of their partner organizations to "Self-Publish".  They do this by granting your organization 'auto-approval' rights.

1) Create a new opportunity and its occurrences - or add one or more new occurrences to an existing opportunity.  The process of adding new occurrences is the same as it is when creating new volunteer opportunities, except you only have to put in the details of the new occurrences.

Once you submit the new opportunity or occurrences, it will be automatically submitted for publication with no approval process needed.  it will be automatically published (usually within 10-15 minutes, and in some cases, the next business day).

You may have to refresh the page in the sharing portal to see the published status updated to reflect that the opportunity is now published on the public site.