Volunteering: how can we think for the future?
February 12, 2024
Volunteering does not happen in a vacuum. Apart from spontaneous volunteering in response to an immediate local or individual need, voluntary action happens within some form of informal or formal organisation, community or place. A vibrant VCSE sector needs full support to thrive, provided by high-quality local infrastructure organisations – NAVCA members. In this blog, we explore some of the current issues with volunteering, and how we can tackle them collectively.
The cost of living crisis is already having many impacts on volunteering, notably an increasing demand for services and activities provided by volunteers and the voluntary sector - without the numbers of volunteers or funding needed to provide it. We know that our members, as leaders in the voluntary sector, have an important role to play in tackling these challenges and continuing to develop good practice. This is why NAVCA and our members are working with the Vision for Volunteering – a ten year initiative to transform volunteering. The Vision provides a useful framework for starting to think about some of these issues.
Firstly, volunteering helps to enrich lives and enliven communities. For individuals, volunteering can contribute to an increased sense of belonging, improved health and wellbeing, reduced social isolation, and learning new skills. However, there has been a decline in satisfaction with volunteering, as shown by NCVO’s Time Well Spent survey. The survey found that if people stop volunteering, this is usually due to a change in personal circumstances, but other factors include a failure to reimburse expenses, expectations of the availability of the volunteer were too high, and a lack of flexibility.
Secondly, to ensure that volunteers have a more positive experience, we need to put the volunteer at the centre of the vision for the future. This means taking a strengths-based approach, rooted in what volunteers want and need, one based around their capabilities and motivations and one that enables the individual to make their most effective contribution. By focusing on the skills and life experience that volunteers bring rather than on the tasks to be completed, voluntary and community sector organisations have the best chance of developing resilient communities, enabling human flourishing, and encouraging people from a wide diversity of backgrounds to volunteer.
Volunteering, fundamentally, should be built around relationships and connections. This enables people to establish a sense of belonging and can tackle isolation and loneliness. It contributes to the resilience of communities and supports communities and individuals to thrive. Government and parts of the public sector see volunteers as a crucial contributor to the delivery of public services, particularly in health and social care. This task based, often transactional approach to volunteering makes an important contribution to serving needs and supporting vulnerable people, but has the potential to lead to issues such as volunteer fatigue or burnout, and risks seeing paid employees replaced with volunteers.
The benefits of volunteering need to be felt in all parts of society. Improving the diversity of volunteers brings a broader variety of life experiences, expertise, connections and relationships into wider decision making, co-production and social action. However, diversity, equity and inclusion remain challenges within volunteering, with fewer volunteers reporting that their volunteer group was diverse (66% in 2022 down from 73% in 2018), and younger volunteers (those aged 18-24) less satisfied with their volunteer experience than older age groups. Equity and inclusion should be a priority for all, with a focus on listening to people with lived experience of exclusion from volunteering, identifying the barriers they have experienced, and being guided by this group to identify the changes needed for inclusion across different excluded groups.
Local infrastructure organisations have the opportunity to enable VCSE organisations to continue to develop volunteering to tackle these key issues. The Vision for Volunteering creates the opportunity for VCS organisations to rethink how they work, share power and practise meaningful inclusivity with volunteers. As representatives of the voluntary sector, we have a responsibility to demonstrate and promote evolving good practice in volunteering: encouraging flexibility and collaboration, recognising who is excluded from volunteering and putting the skills and expertise of the volunteer at the centre.
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