This morning I found myself at Friends House in London at something rather grandly, and I suspect, deliberately, called Volunteering Davos. There were no mountains, no snow and rather fewer private jets, but there was a serious purpose behind the name. Convened by Shaping the Future with Volunteering, it brought together leaders from across civil society to think about what volunteering in the United Kingdom needs to become next.
The question posed to us was a good one because it was both simple and slightly uncomfortable: what will you do? Not what should government do, or business, or funders, or somebody else. What are we, in our own organisations and communities, prepared to do differently? I came away thinking that the future of volunteering may depend on us asking a much bigger question than how we recruit more volunteers. Perhaps the real challenge is how we make contribution a more normal part of life in Britain.
Volunteering is more than free labour
Volunteering has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Scouting gave me some of my earliest experiences of responsibility and leadership, and over the decades volunteering has taken me into communities, organisations and countries I could never have imagined when I first put on a Scout uniform. I have been a trustee, governor and volunteer leader, and much of my professional life has been spent in organisations whose ambitions could never be achieved by paid staff alone.
All of that has left me with a profound belief that volunteering is about much more than getting useful things done for free. Of course it creates economic value. The briefing for this morning’s discussion estimated that volunteers provided 688 million hours of unpaid work in 2024, worth £15.5 billion to the UK economy. But there is a danger in talking too much about monetary value, because we risk valuing volunteering chiefly for the labour it substitutes for rather than for the human and civic capital it creates.
Volunteering builds relationships, trust, confidence and belonging. It introduces people to others whose lives may be very different from their own. It creates the sense that a place or a cause belongs partly to us and that, therefore, we have some responsibility for what happens to it. One statistic in the briefing particularly caught my attention: almost two-thirds of recent volunteers said they felt optimistic about the future of their local area, compared with only a quarter of those who had never volunteered. We should be cautious about assuming cause and effect, but the connection is surely worth noticing.
At a time when we talk so often about isolation, mistrust and fragmentation, this may be one of volunteering’s most important contributions. It gives us reasons to encounter one another and things to do together, and in doing so it can strengthen the social fabric in ways that are difficult to measure but impossible to ignore.
Have we made volunteering too much of a thing?
One of the most interesting strands in this morning’s discussion was about language. We tend to speak about “volunteering” as though it were a distinct sector or activity, yet active citizenship takes many forms. The 17-year-old who stays behind after football training to help coach younger players may not think of himself as a volunteer. Nor necessarily does the person who helps every week at a church, mosque, synagogue or temple, or the neighbour who routinely checks on somebody living alone. They are simply doing their bit.
I wonder whether, in our desire to professionalise volunteering, we have inadvertently made it sound like something done by a particular sort of person. We now have volunteer managers, volunteer strategies, volunteer agreements, volunteer portals and volunteer awards. All of them exist for perfectly sensible reasons, but somewhere along the way we may have turned volunteering into an identity which some people feel belongs to somebody else.
That is why I think the more interesting question is not “How do we persuade more people to become volunteers?” but “How do we make it easier for everybody to contribute?” The distinction matters because it changes where we place the responsibility. Instead of asking people to fit themselves into our structures, we start asking whether our structures are flexible enough to make use of the time, talent and goodwill people actually have.
Designing around people, not institutions
Formal volunteering remains below the levels we saw a decade ago, but perhaps that should not surprise us. The way people work has changed, families have changed, communities have changed and the pressures on people’s time have changed. Yet some of our volunteering models have changed remarkably little.
Too often organisations still begin by designing a role and then go looking for somebody prepared to fit themselves into it. We specify the hours, the meetings, the training, the processes and the expected commitment and then wonder why the person juggling work, children, caring responsibilities and everything else life throws at them says that they would love to help but cannot.
Perhaps we should turn the question around. Rather than asking how people can fit into our volunteering structures, we should ask how we enable them to contribute the time, talents and enthusiasm they actually have. That means one-off and micro-volunteering alongside longer-term commitments, digital participation alongside physical presence, and opportunities to contribute expertise as well as hours.
It also means avoiding an implicit hierarchy in which somebody who gives ten hours a week is seen as a “proper” volunteer and somebody who gives an hour occasionally is not. Someone who gives an hour has not failed to give ten. They have given an hour, and our job is to make that hour worthwhile.
Sometimes the barrier is us
Those of us who lead large charities also have to admit an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the barrier to volunteering is us. Every safeguarding check, risk assessment, training module, data requirement and approval process probably arrived for a good reason, but good reasons accumulate. Eventually the person who says, “I’ve got Saturday morning free — can I help?” can encounter an organisation designed around all the things that might go wrong rather than the contribution that might go right.
The discussion this morning acknowledged that some larger charities can find it difficult to move quickly precisely because their own infrastructure gets in the way. There was also a sharp observation that years of regulatory, safeguarding and risk requirements can gradually turn volunteer engagement into an exercise in satisfying systems rather than inspiring people. At Cats Protection, that is something we have been trying to tackle very deliberately. Our Learning team has been working with colleagues across the charity to reduce radically the amount of training expected of people when they join us, distilling the absolute “must know” into a two-hour session which can be accessed either online or in person.
That work matters because good governance matters enormously, safeguarding matters enormously, and so does making sure that the people joining us understand what they need to know to keep themselves, other people, the cats in our care and the charity safe. But none of that requires us to overwhelm people before they have even had the chance to contribute. The challenge is to be clear about what is genuinely essential at the outset, what can be learned later, and whether every requirement we place in someone’s way remains proportionate to the risk it is intended to manage.
For me, that is the balance we have to keep testing. If our systems become so elaborate that spontaneous generosity is squeezed out, we should have the courage to notice and change them. The aim should not be fewer standards, but better ones: clear, proportionate and focused on what really matters, so that people can get involved with confidence rather than feeling they have enrolled on a course before they have even begun to volunteer.
What Cats Protection teaches me
I see many of these tensions very directly at Cats Protection. Around 10,000 volunteers work alongside our staff, including through more than 200 volunteer-run branches. It is an extraordinary reservoir of knowledge, commitment and local connection.
Our volunteers understand the communities in which they work. They have relationships with veterinary practices and other local organisations. They foster cats, raise funds, help people and bring an extraordinary depth of knowledge and commitment to the organisation. They are not an adjunct to Cats Protection. They are Cats Protection, just as our employees are.
That distinction matters because the leadership question should not simply be “What can volunteers do for us?” It should be “What can staff and volunteers achieve together that neither could achieve alone?” That requires more than good volunteer management. It requires us to think about voice, power and participation, and whether people are genuinely invited to shape an organisation or merely to carry out activities somebody else has designed.
Because Cats Protection has such scale, I think we also have a responsibility to experiment. How do we make it easier for people to give a little time as well as a lot? How do we make better use of skills-based volunteering? How do we design opportunities for families? How do we use technology to remove friction without replacing relationships? We will not get everything right, but we should be helping to discover what the next generation of volunteering looks like.
Start before ten
One of the strongest ideas in the discussion was that if we want volunteering to become part of the national culture, we have to start young — probably younger than we usually imagine. The argument was that, if children experience contributing to others before the age of ten, it can simply become part of their understanding of how life works. Leave it until much later and we are trying to persuade them to adopt a habit rather than helping them grow up with one.
That resonates very strongly with my own experience. I do not want every child in Britain to become a lifelong Scout, although I admit I would not object, but I would love every child to grow up knowing what it feels like to contribute to something beyond themselves.
Schools and youth organisations have an important part to play, but this cannot simply become another compulsory “service” programme bolted onto an already crowded curriculum. The ambition should be broader: a life-course of contribution. Families should be able to volunteer together, children should experience social action in primary school, young people should be trusted with genuine responsibility, employers should make it easier for people to continue contributing during the busiest years of adult life, and retirement should be seen not simply as withdrawal from work but as the arrival of a huge reservoir of experience that might be shared.
The discussion also highlighted a practical problem: many organisations are not designed to accommodate family volunteering easily, whether that means single parents, grandparents who care for children or families simply wanting to contribute together. If we want contribution to become a habit, our organisations have to make that habit possible.
Young people are not volunteers-in-waiting
The briefing made another point I was particularly pleased to see: young people are leaders, contributors and changemakers now, not merely volunteers of the future. I have always been slightly irritated by the phrase “leaders of tomorrow”. Young people are perfectly capable of leading today; what they often lack is not ability but institutions willing to trust them.
There was a good example in the discussion of young people being involved not simply in attending youth provision but in designing and helping to run it, and then carrying that experience of contribution into later life. That is the magic. Volunteering teaches skills, of course, but it also teaches agency. It allows a young person to discover that they can change something, influence something, organise something or help somebody.
If we want young people’s creativity and energy, however, we must accept that they may change our organisations. Inviting them in on condition that everything remains exactly as we designed it is not participation; it is recruitment.
We already have a national resilience network
Another idea from this morning has stayed with me. We tend to think about volunteering and national resilience as separate things, but perhaps they are much more closely connected.
The Red Cross example used in the discussion was compelling. In some communities, volunteers who normally run local activities are already present and trained when a flood, earthquake or other emergency occurs. They do not need to arrive from somewhere else because they are already there.
That raises an intriguing question for Britain. Do we really need to imagine an entirely separate army of resilience volunteers, or should we think more creatively about the millions of people already volunteering in communities across the country?
I found myself thinking about our 10,000 volunteers at Cats Protection. Their first commitment is, of course, to cats and the people who care about them, but they are also 10,000 people distributed around the country who know how to organise, communicate, solve problems and work with others locally. Multiply that by the RNLI, Scouts, Girlguiding, St John Ambulance, the National Trust, sports clubs, faith organisations and thousands of other groups and you begin to see something rather significant.
National ambition, locally delivered
Britain already possesses an extraordinary network of civic capability. We just do not usually look at it that way.
Government clearly has a role in all of this, but not necessarily the role we instinctively give it. Strong communities cannot be manufactured in Whitehall. They are built locally, relationship by relationship, by the people who live in them.
That is why the discussion about devolution interested me. There was a suggestion that parish, district, county and regional authorities should see encouraging participation as part of their normal responsibility. That feels promising because it points towards a national ambition delivered locally, rather than one giant national volunteering scheme.
What we celebrate matters
Government can remove barriers, invest in civic infrastructure, support local organisations and encourage public bodies to see volunteering and active citizenship as part of their work. It should also be clear what this does not mean. Volunteering must never become a convenient euphemism for replacing properly funded public services with unpaid labour. That would undermine both public services and volunteering.
The more interesting role for government is to help create the conditions in which people can contribute, and then trust communities to decide what contribution looks like in their own place.
Another provocative idea raised this morning concerned recognition. Britain has long-established ways of recognising exceptional voluntary contribution, including our honours system, but what about the millions of smaller acts of contribution that form the fabric of community life?
There was a suggestion that we might need something more universal and less hierarchical — some form of recognition for active citizenship that people could carry with pride. I am not sure a literal badge is the answer, but the underlying question is worth asking.
We recognise academic attainment. We celebrate sporting achievement. Employers pay attention to qualifications and professional experience. Why should somebody’s record of contribution have so little social currency?
Not because volunteering should become transactional, but because what a society chooses to recognise tells us something about what that society values.
Culture is the real prize
Towards the end of this morning’s discussion, one word kept recurring: culture. Several of the working groups returned to it, and the conclusion seemed to be that volunteering will not become part of everyday life simply through better recruitment campaigns or more sophisticated platforms. It needs to become part of the culture of organisations, businesses and communities.
I think that is right, and it is probably the thought I will carry longest from the morning. Britain does not need a volunteering strategy nearly as much as it needs a culture of contribution.
That means a culture in which a six-year-old experiences helping other people as something perfectly ordinary, a teenager coaches younger children without wondering whether that makes them a “volunteer”, and somebody with a demanding job can still contribute an hour because organisations know how to use it. It means employers seeing civic participation as part of developing good colleagues and good citizens, and retirement releasing decades of knowledge and experience back into communities.
It also means that, when something goes badly wrong, people already know one another, know how to organise and instinctively step forward. That is a rather more ambitious goal than improving a volunteering participation statistic, and it places a responsibility on organisations such as mine.
At Cats Protection, we need to keep asking whether our structures release people’s willingness to contribute or constrain it; whether we genuinely share leadership with volunteers; whether we make room for the person who can give an hour as well as the person who has given forty years; and whether we are helping to create active citizens rather than simply filling volunteer vacancies.
Perhaps, then, I came away from Volunteering Davos thinking rather less about volunteering than I expected. I found myself thinking about citizenship: about what binds us to places and to one another, about how children learn that they have something to offer, about how institutions can release rather than regulate people’s willingness to help, and about whether we can recover the idea that contributing to the life around us is simply part of belonging.
I would love to reach the point where asking somebody whether they volunteer feels almost as peculiar as asking whether they ever help their friends. Not because everybody belongs to a charity or sits on a committee, but because at different points in our lives we all find our own way of doing our bit.
If that is the ambition, the task ahead is not simply to rebuild volunteering after a period of declining participation. It is to build a culture of contribution — beginning young, continuing throughout life, rooted in place and open to everyone. Not volunteering as something good people do for Britain, but contributing as part of what it means to belong to Britain.
