Who is volunteering?

by Denise Hayward, CEO, Volunteer Now

In the Guildhall in Derry/Londonderry this week a group of volunteer involving organisations will come together for the first of a series of events in Northern Ireland to mark the UN Year of Volunteering for Sustainable Development.  We will take a deep dive into the data to explore the trends in who is volunteering and who is not.  Key themes of the discussion will be that overall volunteering levels in terms of the number of people volunteering have returned to pre-covid rates.  However, this masks the reduction in the number of young people volunteering.  Data in N. Ireland does not allow a conclusion at present about whether people are giving fewer hours, however anecdotally this is seen to be an issue.  There is also a disparity in levels of volunteering in some groups with people with disabilities and people on lower incomes not volunteering as much as other groups.
 
Volunteer Now has been working with a group of students from the Science Shop at Queens University, to provide insights into some of these issues and one sentence stands out,  “Volunteers are not deterred by volunteering itself, but by organisational structures that cannot provide clarity, flexibility or meaningful progression.”  This finding is in relation particularly to younger volunteers where there is a key challenge at present.  The group told us that they felt that organisations had not kept pace with what young people needed to access volunteering.  There was not enough flexibility or clear progression routes and organisations were slow to embrace the digital technology which is the norm for young people.
 
One of the things we often hear is that volunteering has declined since Covid.  However, the evidence in Northern Ireland shows that is not the case.  As people change volunteering must keep pace with that change and there is more to do to make volunteering more accessible for many people.  A challenge made more difficult in organisations struggling to make ends meet.   This is vital for us all as young people are not just the volunteers of today but also tomorrow – we need to prioritise their involvement.