A volunteering crisis: what crisis?
Julian Lomas
The 2023/24 Community Life Survey revealed some worrying issues for volunteering in England, with volunteering reported to be at an all time low. Only 33% of adults in England reported that they give up their time at least once a month to help someone else and only 54% had volunteered at least once in the last year. This is despite evidence that young people are more willing to volunteer, even in formal roles such as being a Trustee.
Now we read that Janet Thorne, CEO at Reach Volunteering, consider that volunteering in the UK is thriving. Janet reports that trends experienced by Reach Volunteering’s recruitment activity show a fourfold increase in people sighing up to volunteer since getting pandemic and a surge in grassroots volunteer-led initiatives. She concludes that many volunteer-led organisations are thriving; that organisations with no paid staff. The number of such groups using Reach has grown almost 1000% since 2019 and they are not all hyper-local groups, some are large and innovative.
Reach is seeing that these organisations (and there are probably over 350,000 of them in total) are offering a very different model of volunteering to the traditional approaches, one that is:
Flexible – designed to fit around people’s lives, rather than requiring fixed hours in a fixed place, and remote or hybrid, removing geographical barriers.
Purpose-led – rooted directly in the organisation's mission.
Participatory - with volunteers often shaping their own engagement, the work they do and the organisation’s strategy.
Reach term this a ‘relational model’ of volunteering that belies a shift in attunes where people are increasingly seeing themselves as citizens rather than consumers, and it’s increasingly important in charity software all sizes where volunteering is a significant part of the human resource mix. reach’s research shows that the most popular motivations for volunteering are “knowing that my skills are making a positive difference”, “to make a positive difference on an issue I care about” and “to contribute to a better, fairer society.” They found that “Furthering my career” and “strengthening my professional network” were much less important motivators, even for younger people.
Mirroring many of the tips we offered in our late 2024 blog on volunteering, Janet’s blog goes on to suggest some principles for organisations to shift towards the relational model of volunteering:
Centre your purpose. Communicate your goals and your impact clearly. Make the link between volunteer opportunities and your purpose explicit so that volunteers can see how their participation matters.
Define volunteer opportunities with enough specificity that people can imagine themselves doing it and can understand what they could contribute, but be flexible as to what, how and when they do it. Allow roles to be done remotely, where possible.
Invite people to contribute their ideas and to help shape the work and the organisation.
Connect swiftly. Design human contact early in the recruitment process, to connect and start building a relationship
Be human centred. Recognise that people come with a wide array of motivations, constraints and contexts. Support people to self-direct and define their contribution
Chunk it up. Break large projects or tasks into smaller elements so that the initial commitment is not too daunting, and success is more likely.
But be open to possibility. Be clear about the outcome you are after, but be open to more creative and ambitious solutions than you expected. Give space for the volunteer and the project to develop.
Create teams. If the opportunity allows for it, create volunteer teams with mixed skills and experience. You will gain more capacity, and reduce reliance any one individual; the volunteers will have a richer learning experience and sense of community.
This is good advice based on real world evidence and experience and a welcome positive view in what can, at times, feel like a relentlessly negative news landscape for the third sector in the UK. It’s tough out there but it’s far from all bad. There are growing numbers of voluntary sector organisations that are thriving because they invest in the volunteers and the things that matter to them. We salute them and implore others to follow their lead.