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Future of volunteering

5/14/2009

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Improving Support Magazine investigates how third sector support organisations are finding innovative ways to help frontline organisations meet the volunteering challenges ahead.

New face of volunteering
Volunteering has gone professional. The days when being a volunteer meant helping out at the local soup kitchen or picking litter off the streets may not be gone completely, but charities are now recognising the opportunity – and the need – to recruit and use their volunteers in different, more effective ways.

Recession leads to increase in volunteers
As the number of volunteers swells due to the recession, employer-supported and skills-based volunteering is becoming more common.

Latest figures
Only one-sixth (16%) of the general public who responded to the Office of the Third Sector’s 1997 National Survey of Volunteering and Charitable Giving said their employers ran volunteering schemes. That had risen to more than a third (36%) by 2007.

Recognising the importance of volunteer trustees
Among charities there is also growing recognition of the need to find volunteer trustees in a more efficient way.

A key point in Good Governance: A Code for the Voluntary and Community Sector, put together by a steering group of organisations and published in 2005, was that trustee boards need to have a diverse range of skills, experience and knowledge to run an organisation effectively.

Responding to changing trends
Third sector support organisations are responding forcefully to these changing trends, and are working on solutions to help frontline organisations keep up with the times and continue to attract and keep volunteers and trustees.

Employer-supported volunteering
“Employer-supported volunteering in general has increased, and alongside that the tide has been changing towards skills-based volunteering supported by employers – and that’s vital in terms of capacity building for charities,” says Edie MacGill, National Support Service Senior Operations Officer at Volunteering England.

To read more, please download the full "Future of Volunteering" article