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According to the latest Community Life Survey Community Life Survey 2023/24: Volunteering and charitable giving - GOV.UK published in December 2024, volunteer numbers are at an all-time low since they have started to be counted this way in 2001. There is a great deal of wringing of hands amongst policy makers, practitioners and researchers as to the reasons for this. However, many of them avoid the blunt and concise answer that is offered when volunteer involvement is constructed as the expression of individual agency, a choice to volunteer.
People don’t want to do it and you cannot make them! It’s volunteering!
Another possibility is that people want to volunteer but cannot. The last serious dip in volunteer numbers was during the financial crisis in 2008-2009. The fact that volunteer numbers have now fallen even below the numbers during the pandemic might be connected to the ongoing cost of living crises.
Having said all that, the UK has the privilege of a well-developed civil society, formed over centuries, and these numbers do not suggest that volunteer involvement will disappear overnight. However, policy makers practitioners and researchers might treat it with the respect it deserves. At the moment that is not necessarily the case.
IVR was set up in 1997 to undertake high quality research on volunteering. It started out as a department of Volunteering England, became part of the research department of NCVO in 2013 and moved to the University of East Anglia in 2019. During the last twenty years, IVR has played a leading role in applied volunteering research involving volunteer organisations, the public sector, private sector and the government.
IVR’s mission is to support and undertake high quality volunteering research to bring about a world in which the power and energy of volunteering and the difference volunteering and volunteering research make to individuals and communities is well understood, so that individuals can be confident and feel safe about their decision to volunteer and communities grow stronger.
Get in touch with us by emailing info.ivr@uea.ac.uk
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Video
IVR has created a series of short animations on volunteering for beginners
Volunteering for Beginners in seven and a half minutes
And if you haven’t got seven and a half minutes, here are short videos on
Where and how can I volunteer?
What difference does volunteering make?
What are the benefits for the volunteer?
