Volunteering ‘thriving’ since the Covid-19 pandemic despite reports, charity chief says

Volunteering has been “thriving” since the Covid-19 pandemic, the head of a platform that connects volunteers with charities has said. 

Speaking on the Third Sector Podcast, Janet Thorne, chief executive of Reach Volunteering, said the charity had seen a fourfold increase in service users since 2019 with more than 16,000 volunteers signing up with the charity last year.

Last year’s research from Pro Bono Economics and Nottingham Trent University’s National VCSE Data and Insights Observatory found six in 10 organisations faced difficulties in volunteer recruitment and almost half had not seen an increase in numbers in the previous 12 months.

But contrary to stories about volunteering being in decline, Reach Volunteering is seeing “the total opposite”, said Thorne.

“The other striking trend that we’re seeing is huge growth in the number of volunteer-led organisations with no paid staff at all,” she said.

“Back in 2019, we had 69 organisations like that using Reach. Last year it was more than 650.

“That’s the sort of sharpest increase that we’ve seen over this period of any organisational growth.”

The charities that use Reach are a “really interesting array”, ranging from local groups to international organisations, said Thorne.

She said organisations that had a clear purpose tended to perform better in terms of attracting volunteers.

“Particularly ones which are led by and for the communities they serve, communities facing structural injustice like racial injustice and migrant organisations,” Thorne added.

“They have a higher fill rate on our platform than other organisations.”

Reach Volunteering is seeing more volunteers apply for “significant, substantial roles” as opposed to the common thought within the sector that micro-volunteering is more popular, Thorne said, with short-term projects tending to do better than open-ended roles.

“The other thing is just the organisations that we’re seeing doing really well have an approach which is really quite open to what the volunteer can bring and what they want to bring,” she said. 

“They are open to seeing what emerges from their engagement with the volunteer rather than defining it all upfront.

“They are a lot more flexible, and I think that’s something that small charities are used to doing with their staffing, for example.”

The Third Sector podcast episode featuring Janet Thorne can be found here.