Volunteering

[rattymol]

The number of people volunteering has really fallen. I am interested in why. So
Yalu = I don't volunteer and won't
Yanbu = I do volunteer or would

Interested as well to know why people volunteer or don't volunteer.

Something like Parkrun might work for you if there's one nearby?

Saturday morning for a couple of hours, lots of different roles to try out and see which you enjoy most, and no commitment to do every week, you can just join the volunteer roster as and when you're available.

Great community event to be a part of for all ages and abilities.

Some of the bureaucracy (DBS, Safeguarding training, Prevent etc) has increased and interviews/training is increasingly online deterring older volunteers.
COL and pension changes mean people are staying in paid work for longer
Previously paid roles are bring advertised to volunteers making them feel exploited
Decline in resources available within charity sector to recruit and manage volunteers officially.
Sense of being valued and developed as volunteers is more hit and miss

Volunteered during first rounds of Covid vaccinations, booking people in, sending them to vaccinator, checking they were ok if they had to wait afterwards , cleaning chairs, clipboards, door handles etc.. Gave up as CoL tried to claim petrol expenses, app was useless and didn’t always work. Also pharmacy owner was bloody rude and sneery, they’ve made thousands a month out of the vaccinations. Haven’t gone back.

St John Ambulance doesn’t operate that way. You can pick and choose what you want to do.

I volunteered for various things over the years but currently not doing anything
Various reasons why
Time - I have moved my mum who has Alzheimer's closer to me so I visit her every other day which squeezes everything else plus doing shopping etc for her takes up more time
Work - has got busier so less spare time
Kids - have got busier as got older sorting stuff for them
DHs job (NHS dr) has got more full on so less he can help with the above meaning it falls on me see lack of time
Health - I am disabled and my health takes a toll from the above
Previous volunteering experience - have had to deal with some major shit over the years from other volunteers, the community, being let down, unappreciated etc - no good deed goes unpunished and all that.

I volunteer for an incredible local project with SEND families. It takes about 4 hours a month of my time. I love it because it feels like we are doing something of significant value and meaning, rather than just propping up businesses doing stuff that should be paid.

It has led to a fab employment opportunity for me.

I also volunteer for my children's school PTA. I love seeing the kids have an amazing time and the fact we have just fundraised a significant addition to the school. It is very self rewarding.

Nowadays I think the pressure on people is so high there isn't the time and I think a lot of volunteer roles are things that should be paid. I explicitly won't do a role like that.

I volunteer. I volunteered at my kids school when my youngest started and ended up working there. I had to stop when my other son was at his special secondary school as timings didn't work out, and I had to be around to pick him up.

I also started volunteering at Scouts when my youngest started Beavers. 10 years later and I'm still doing it. I love seeing the kids progress and achieve stuff. I like doing the admin and planning for it. As I don't work because of being a carer it means it gives me something to do, and hopefully some experience to put on a CV if I'm able to look for work in the future.

I did notice it's always the same faces and families that volunteer. For example, some of the scout leaders were also on the PTA or school governors.

I more or less gave up volunteering when i realised I was still employable and could get part-time paid work, even though I am officially retired and aged 65+. Charities sometimes seem to have very high expectations of volunteers, and not to show enough gratitude for work they are not paying for. Having had a fairly senior job in the past I also felt some charities were not very well managed. Volunteers may put up with unsatisfactory conditions for a while, but then use the freedom they have to leave. TBH on some of the forums I belong to I am amazed at how dedicated some volunteers are, despite the lack of appreciation.

Our employer ( large in the financial sector) has just announced a pilot where everyone with compressed hours will lose them. This means many volunteers will be forced to stop, because they can't afford to keep doing it.

There is a charity I really want to volunteer with but they won't take me because I work shifts so can not commit to the same day and time each week.
Not sure why this particular role needs to be Monday to Friday 9-5.

Saw this after I'd written my post , I feel the same. They are missing good people by being so blinkered.

I work FT and I still volunteer for a role helping young children. I really enjoy it as it gives me something to do and I love seeing the children progress and we all have fun. I personally find it more productive and I know if I was at home, I would end up surfing the net, watching mindless TV or getting worried over silly things so volunteering helps distract me.

The organisation pays me for my travel, lunch and any training fees. They don't treat me like an employee and whilst I do come in and help on set days, they don't rely on me being there - so I am like an extra pair of hands but not intended to replace a paid staff member. This way I also feel that if I can't come in then they can still operate and have other staff cover. Whilst I enjoy volunteering, I would have no hesitation of leaving if I was unhappy with it or came to resent it.

I was volunteering to help children with their reading in a school setting. But the teachers etc were so rude, I stopped going

Yes I did this for a while, teachers were nice

I do volunteer but it's sporadic every few months rather then a set regular time slot which is fine for the charity.

I work full time and have a 1 and 4 year old and barely find time to keep ontop of the washing let alone a weekly volunteer thing too!

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).

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

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

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'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 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 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.

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

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.