Volunteering

I work a busy (more than) full time NHS job. I have skirted burnout on several occasions over the last few years and very much need my downtime when not working. Volunteering is not something that feels possible at present.

I would be interested in volunteering when I retire (10 yrs or so) but will try to find a role which does not involve interacting with the public.

I volunteer on the committee of the
sports club that my daughter is a member of. Only some of the activities I run are relevant for my daughter, and sometimes it takes me away from supporting her participation, but it's a great club and she has got a lot out of it so i wanted to give a bit back. Everybody who joins is supposed to also do 1 event day that they volunteer at as conditions of being a member. They can choose an event that they wouldn't normally participate in (e.g. the parent of a novice junior can do their duty day at an event for advanced adults). We really struggle to get people to keep this commitment, but without it, the club couldn't run, or would need to pay a lot of staff and costs for each event would be sky high.

Many of the committee members are retired, no longer participate in the sport, and really want to step down but there aren't many younger volunteers willing to take on a committee role, even when we break them down into relatively small tasks. I can see clubs having to close if they are unable to get me committee members to run them.

I work full time, have a child and animals to look after etc. And it's hard fitting it in, but I do feel that if I want my daughter to enjoy what the club offers then somebody needs to help organise it.

Still no further posts from @rattymol the OP.

I do a lot of volunteering atm. 3 committees, one of which I chair (not long home from a successful fundraiser) and another voluntary roĺe related to my previous career. Plus PTA stuff and occasional help with my daughter's rainbow pack.

However I'm mostly a sahm but if I up my hours after the summer something will have to give because I'm studying and my children are still relatively young.

I’ve done several volunteer roles.

I did the training for CAB and would have carried through with that, but they wanted so much commitment and things like booking in holidays. If I’m not being paid, I’m not going to be told when I can take a holiday and have to fill in a holiday allocation sheet.

So many hoops to jump through and application forms to fill in, for the most basic and boring of jobs. It’s difficult to find professional referees when you aren’t working.

Repetitive and boring jobs, with no prospect of being given something more interesting to do.

Spending money on travel, parking etc, so volunteering costs the volunteer money. Not sustainable with rising prices everywhere.

Under appreciated and lack of interest from paid employees. It’s as though they don’t really want volunteers at all.

Lack of interest. Going through volunteer opportunities on websites and getting in contact, to be told they don’t want anyone, or often, no response at all.

I volunteer and have done in various ways since I was about 15. Currently, my volunteering is for a community music group, a children's sports activity and a parenting group/resource. I do it because they are things I believe in, there are roles I can fulfil that mean the activities can continue and because I can fit them around my full-time job and children's activities. They are substitute hobbies really so maybe I'll do less once children have left home and I can reliably join evening activities.

In the past I've volunteered lots of hours each day to set up/run booking systems for community venues that were entirely volunteer-run but needed to generate an income from its spaces in order to keep going. After about three years one of them was in a position to employ a member of staff to manage the venue (including the bookings) and I was delighted. My volunteering has always been very flexible and apart from attendance at committee meetings, doesn't require me to commit to a certain number of hours each week/a specific time slot.

I volunteer for 3 different things a week, my husband volunteers 1 thing a week, my son volunteers 1 thing a week and my daughter doesnt do any but will do from September.

All the things we volunteer at, benefit the community and wouldn't be able to happen if there were no volunteers

I volunteer as the Treasurer of my DC school PTA, as well as going on the occasional school trip.

I also do unpaid NED work, however lots of those opportunities are now become inv paid, so I'm doing those instead.

I volunteer at a living history museum where I dress as a Victorian and tell the visitors how people lived in Victorian times which I really enjoy

I used to do hours of volunteering a week but now I don't do any. On the surface it's because I now work full-time irregular hours and have DC so I don't have time and can't commit to anything.

Other reasons- unrealistic expectations of volunteers. Several times I've sounded out the time expectations around a role, to be told it's only one Tuesday evening a month and that's it. Work out this is feasible, start it and discover there's extra stuff each week, online things to do and some Saturdays. Clearly in the past people used to just suck this up so there was consternation when I turned round and said I was only doing what I'd agreed to!

Training requirements. I totally agree with the need for safeguarding, DBS etc but I used to be involved with Guiding and it was a 2 hour meeting plus set up/clear up time each week, at least another evening a week of planning or training, remember to do some shopping for supplies, then extra stuff at weekends. I stopped at the point when someone thought I would volunteer a week of annual leave to go to camp!

General public are often unpleasant. I used to volunteer at a heritage thing but instead of being grateful someone made it available for them, I just got moaned at because of the limited time it was open, people wasting my time by being really late and frankly unrealistic expectations.

Litter picking is probably one if the most accessible as and when options. Your local council can supply you with equipment, or put you in touch with groups for free equipment. It's not glamorous and I live it as it is totally anonymous.

I’ve volunteered at parkrun before but found it quite cliquey. Saw someone turn up to volunteer at a parkrun recently and he was turned away because they already had enough. Can see that might put people off.
Also tried to volunteer at school and at a food bank but don’t get a response. Like another poster said earlier it seems to be the same people volunteering all over. They always shout out about needing more but don’t make it easy for ‘new’ people to join in.

To be honest I ‘volunteer’ enough extra unpaid hours in my nhs job that volunteering elsewhere seems a big ask.
Many of the serial volunteers I know seem to do it for the social media kudos.

I have been volunteering for nearly 30 years, currently for 2 different organisations.

For me, it's because I am GC and I refuse to use 'inclusive' language as I find it excludes women who, like me, don't want to be reduced to their bodily functions.

I think for many, it's because they now find their pension/benefits don't cover their living costs so have had to find gainful employment as opposed to voluntary work.

I think people volunteer when there are gaps they would like to see filled. I have volunteered to do my local poppy collection this year. I was surprised that we had nowhere locally to buy them.

I think places have forgotten why people volunteer. They need to get something out of it. If I want to work hard for free and have no one notice I can stay at home.

This.

I volunteer for Parkrun every week and for my kids football club, my DH also volunteers for the kids football club (much more than me!). We both love volunteering, it’s enriched all of our family life, made us new friends and given us new stuff to talk about.

@rattymol, do you volunteer?
If yes what do you do, if not, why not?

I used to volunteer but it sucked away too much time. I also found that large organisations are unsupportive of their volunteers, and smaller ones keep trying to get me to do management tasks for free (and I don’t want the responsibility).

I consider trying again every now and then, but the recruitment process is arduous and irritating. So I don’t bother.

I volunteer because the work aligns with my values and time spent on that contributes to my overall happiness and also helps them out.

I don't get that same satisfaction from work so in my spare time, I get to do something I love and that's supporting the elderly.

I'm volunteering and have volunteered for a long time. But for the first time in 15 years, I'm considering stopping for several reasons but the main one relates to the cost of living at the moment:

1. it costs me money every time in parking, after school childcare for my children and often buying things that the food centre doesn't provide but that clients need (i.e. someone comes but has no pots and pans it's hard to send them away with food but no utensils to cook it with).
2. I feel I should spend the time working instead - with things the way they are it seems a luxury to have a weekday that's not spent either looking after my children or earning money.

Why I do it still? The work is desperately needed as the COL crises worsens. But our family could really do with the extra income that day volunteering would provide.

I used to volunteer when I had a child at school and wasn't working. Now I'm busy with 2 younger dc - time with them is valuable and I wouldn't give it up to help out others that I have no connection to.

There were also other aspects I didn't like about it - lack of flexibility and expectations, and office politics. Bad enough in a normal job but in this case you don't even get paid! I think I'd only consider volunteering now if it helped me get into specific training or employment - but these days they expect recent references for that sort of volunteer role (and often not willing to be helpful with references later on). And I'm doing well with self-employment right now so I don't think I'd need to. I enjoy my leisure and family time too much to want to give it up for purely altruistic reasons.

I volunteer.
I do it for lots of reasons

• it enhances my life
• it helps make the world go round
• I've appreciated accessing things for my dc that were run by people giving their time - it pays that forward
• some of the time, it is fun
• it gives me a huge number of friends, a number of 'communities' that I am part of

Same here. I can see the value of volunteering and used to when I was a teenager. Now though, if I had more mental and physical energy available I would use it instead to earn enough to fix everything that's broken in my home

In my side of things (wildlife) there is a lot of skill involved and frankly people have to invest a lot of time to get there. For example hand rearing birds, the syringe feeding is hard and delicate, you can't speak to them etc. So most of our volunteers that are only coming once a month end up doing unskilled work, that frankly is less rewarding.
People tend to want to spend time with the animals, but really it's stuff like cleaning out, admin and washing up that need doing, but people don't want to do that.

I volunteer every other Sunday for a wildlife charity. I've been doing this for 6 years now. I work full time Mon - Fri (approx 50-60+ hours/week) in a stressful, high pressure job and my volunteering with wildlife is my way of having some 'me time'. But it means a 100 mile drive so expensive with current petrol prices, and Sunday traffic can mean I spend 3-4 hours total in my car, on top of my actual volunteering shift. It's exhausting! I used to do it weekly but had to cut back to fortnightly because it was just too tiring for me (I also have long Covid) and was affecting my 'day job' . It is incredibly rewarding spending time with the animals but it's taken time to build the experience to do that. I've spent a lot of time cleaning up poo and pee and doing washing (and still do).

Because of my existing wildlife experience, I was also asked to cover one summer as a volunteer baby bird feeder. OMG it was stressful! It's surprisingly complex. Rewarding but absolutely terrifying that some tiny little baby bird is going to die because you made a mistake.

I've been volunteering on and off since childhood. My family have always got involved with helping the local community so it's always just been normal to me. I was one of those annoying kids at age 7 selling stuff on a table at the side of the road to raise money for the RSPCA. 🙄I've been a volunteer vet's assistant at the PDSA, I've been a Samaritan, I've delivered project management training courses to charity workers, and only a week ago a group of us spent a day (very badly) gardening at a children's adventure playground in Hackney.

I wish I could do more. A lot more. But my job is very full-on so I have to be realistic about what's possible. I had to give up Samaritans because of work - their mandatory shift timings clashed with my job and in the end I just couldn't make it work on a regular basis (although I believe the Samaritans have relaxed their shift requirements in recent years).