Volunteering is thriving - Just not where you’ve been looking

We keep hearing that volunteering is in decline. Surveys show falling volunteer rates and many large, traditional volunteer-involving organisations report dwindling numbers [1].  Smaller charities, too, say that they are struggling to recruit [2].  NCVO named the volunteer shortage as a key challenge for charities in 2025 [3]. But this story of decline is not the universal experience it claims to be, and beyond the reach of traditional metrics something remarkable is happening. A less visible but very vibrant ecosystem of volunteering is thriving. 

At Reach Volunteering, we’ve seen this shift firsthand:  a fourfold increase in people signing up to volunteer since the pandemic - over 16,000 new volunteers last year alone  - and a surge in grassroots, volunteer-led initiatives. And this is just one piece of a bigger story. What we’re witnessing is not the death of volunteering—it’s a profound shift in how and why people volunteer.

The rise of volunteer-led organisations

One of the most significant trends we have seen is the explosion of small, volunteer-led organisations with no paid staff at all. In 2019 just 69 such groups were using Reach. Last year there were 650. These groups are hugely varied - some are tiny hyper local groups, others are large and highly innovative. They tend to be deeply embedded in their communities and led by the people they serve. They fly under the radar because they don't show up in traditional volunteer networks. They’re not using volunteer management software, attending sector conferences, or engaging with volunteering as a "sector" at all. Their very existence refutes the story that people are not volunteering. It is tricky to determine how many such groups there are. A recent NAVCA report estimated that there are over 330,000 very small local groups - but this won’t include the larger volunteer groups or communities of identity which operate regionally or nationally. They may be hard to quantify, but these groups and movements are a very encouraging signal of volunteer activity.

A new relationship with volunteering

The volunteer roles in these organisations look very different from the traditional model. They’re often:

●       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.

This is a relational model of volunteering. It invites people in not just to help, but to co-create. A great example is East London Waterworks Park, a campaign to create a community owned biodiverse park. They have over 470 volunteers and no paid staff. They have already successfully raised over £2 million towards the purchase of the land, and their success in including people who are historically underrepresented in environmental projects is now influencing the wider built environment sector. Volunteers carry out every aspect of the work  from architectural design to learning projects for schools.  Their highly successful approach to volunteer recruitment is simple. They frame it as an invitation to people who care about creating a community park to come and get involved. They advertise volunteer roles on platforms like Reach, and respond swiftly to applicants with a phone call.  The message is just bring your skills and interests and we’ll figure out together how you can contribute.

It's not just volunteer led groups which operate in this way. Many small charities take a similar, relational and emergent approach. Take, for example, Move Mates, a York based project which pairs volunteers with people who would otherwise find it difficult to leave their homes so they can go for a walk together. They needed a better digital solution to recruit and train volunteers and coordinate pairings. They did not have the expertise in-house to scope the project so they recruited a volunteer, Rob, who is an experienced developer,  to help them. He then proposed creating a volunteer team to deliver the system itself. They recruited four junior developers and two mentors to work alongside Rob. This included a new graduate looking to build experience and a refugee wanting to use this volunteering experience to find a first UK job in the digital sector. The project saved them thousands of pounds. At Reach, where we also involve volunteers in our work,  we are often happily surprised at how the ambition and impact of a project grow, thanks to the ideas, expertise and energy that the volunteers bring. The end result often exceeds what we had imagined.

This kind of emergent, responsive engagement means that volunteers can contribute to something they believe in, in ways that respect their agency and their personal situation.  It understands participation as a process that transforms the volunteer and the organisation. As the work unfolds, and the volunteer grows, or their situation changes, the nature of the engagement changes. It’s volunteering as co-production, not task fulfilment.

Volunteering as a response to a fractured world

This approach aligns with people’s motivations. We have just run a survey to explore why people volunteer and what they get out of it. We had over  700 respondents,  mostly from within our network of skills-based volunteers so we can assume that it provides a good insight into the surge of volunteers we have seen at Reach. The survey found that people are motivated to volunteer by a sense of purpose. The most popular motivations were “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.” “Furthering my career” and “strengthening my professional network” were much less important motivators, even for younger people.

It was striking how bleak and uneasy people felt about the state of the world. Common descriptors were  scary, challenging, unequal, uncertain, sad, divided, and selfish. Despite this, the number one reason they volunteer is that they believe they can make a difference. And crucially, they feel that they are making one. Volunteering is a powerful source of hope and a way of transforming despair in the world into agency and positive action.

There is plenty of research showing that a sense of wider purpose is important for our well being, and that volunteering can be a route to this. Volunteering has even been shown to lower blood pressure and cholesterol and reduce chronic inflammation. It is, quite literally, good for your gut. What is fascinating is that the research shows that motivation really matters: for the full benefits to be felt, the volunteering needs to be generous and heart felt, and genuinely done to help others. If it is done for reasons of self interest, the benefits are not realised. So deep down, at the very level of our gut, we are designed to be collaborative. We are hardwired to contribute to something bigger than ourselves—and volunteering gives us a chance to do just that.

Yet too often, investment in volunteering has focused on efficiency, convenience, reducing friction, and micro-volunteering, as though convenience is the main motivator. While ease matters and no one likes cumbersome admin, our data shows that people are willing to take on significant, even demanding, roles if those roles are clearly linked to meaningful impact.

Closing the values perception gap

There’s also a wider risk: perpetuating the myth that people no longer care actually undermines action. Research into the values perception gap [4] shows that people consistently underestimate how much others care about social and environmental issues. You can see this pattern repeated again and again. For example, there is a slew of evidence that  the overwhelming majority of the world’s people — between 80 and 89% — want stronger climate action. This overwhelming global majority of people, however, does not realise that they are a majority; most think their fellow citizens don’t agree.

This perception gap really matters[5]. When people think that most others don’t care, they feel marginalised and lose hope, and they are much less likely to take action themselves. When we repeat the story that volunteering is declining, we reinforce this perception gap.

However, when we highlight people’s care and concern, and spotlight  stories of people taking action, we provide a corrective to the perception gap, reshape that narrative and foster more participation. By sharing stories of collective action, we strengthen people’s awareness of and belief in shared values, and encourage them to take action themselves. To quote adrienne maree brown: “what we pay attention to, grows”.

From consumers to citizens

A shift in volunteering reflects something bigger than just new models of engagement. It’s part of a wider cultural evolution—a shift that Jon Alexander has described as a move from the Consumer Story to the Citizen Story [6].

In the Consumer Story, people relate to institutions the way they relate to companies: as customers. They’re offered predefined options, like choosing between political manifestos or service packages, and their role is to select, not shape. Change is something done to them or for them, not with them. This framing has shaped everything from healthcare to education to democratic participation. However, as our institutions struggle to meet the challenges of today - let alone tomorrow - it is clear that we need a new model.

The Citizen Story imagines people as active participants in the world around them. Citizens don’t just receive services—they help create and improve them. They aren’t passive supporters of charities—they’re collaborators, leaders, changemakers. They engage not because it’s convenient, but because they’re invited into purposeful work that reflects their values. This approach is not new.  It has been embedded in many community organisations for decades, but it is not widespread in volunteering. The shift in framing is quite nuanced and can feel quite slippery. To try and make it more tangible I have created the table below, recognising that, in practice, some organisations will contain a mix of both frames.

There are many places - often at the ‘edges’ - where innovations like this are expanding. For example, the #DoWith network, led by King’s Fund which calls for a radical shift in public services to do things with rather than to people and communities while also freeing and resourcing them to do more for themselves on their own terms. It creates more sustainable models, shifts power to communities, and delivers better outcomes. 

Moving forwards

There is no one solution to move us forward because volunteering is so many different things - each volunteer brings a unique combination of motivations, constraints and possibilities, each organisation has different needs and options, and is grounded in a specific community. However, here are some principles which I think could be useful.

For organisations:

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. 

For those supporting the volunteering ecosystem:

Recognise the full spectrum of where and how volunteering happens. Volunteer-led and grassroot charities engage volunteers in creative ways and have a significant impact. There is more happening ‘at the edges’ than you might imagine.

Invest in infrastructure which supports a plural, diverse ecosphere of volunteering. Centralised top-down initiatives only support some types of volunteering. Grassroots organisations, movements and volunteer-run groups are powerful changemakers. They need a different kind of support, and a little investment goes a long way.

Support narrative change - help counter the damaging myth that volunteering is in decline. Invest in storytelling, research, and public campaigns that highlight the diversity and vitality of contemporary volunteering. This includes surfacing under-told stories from the edges, not just amplifying mainstream voices.

Be open to the power of collective action - volunteers have a huge role to play in building a just and sustainable world, and they are keen to do it. Take them seriously.  

In a time of social fragmentation, economic instability, and environmental crisis, we need ways to rebuild agency, solidarity, and hope. Volunteering has an important role to play but we need to take volunteers, and volunteering, more seriously.

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Image by Daniela Yankova – shadowschaser – under Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA)

[1] https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/volunteering-rates-still-failing-to-...

[2] https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/half-charities-struggling-recruit-voluntee...

[3] NCVO The Road Ahead

[4] https://commoncausefoundation.org/_resources/perceptions-matter-report-s...

[5] https://reachvolunteering.org.uk/blog/let-s-change-story

[6] https://www.newcitizenproject.com/