We want a future in which a culture of volunteering is further ingrained in the collective psyche, part of everyone’s life, from childhood to later life, and woven into the activities and pastimes of day-to-day living. A future in which it’s always easy to find ways to make a difference. 

Volunteering is a continuum of involvement and participation, from occasional to regular and from highly organised to informal. We should not expect that volunteers will stay with an organisation indefinitely. It needs to be easy to move to other volunteering roles, to pause or stop volunteering, and to start again, whether because of what is happening in our lives, or because of changing needs and issues in society. To support this fluidity, organisational cultures must embrace sharing and flexibility, with volunteers moving between organisations and activities, to develop and try new things. 

Although large numbers of volunteers certainly come together with clear objectives at moments of crisis, such as Covid-19, we must never consider this to be an unpaid workforce, cheap source of labour or an ‘army’.

Volunteers and the communities they serve have power and are leaders.

We want a future where the power of volunteers and communities is recognised and supported. Where volunteering is understood as the community taking action, often enabled or supported by organisations, but not always driven or generated by them.

Everyday, volunteers make things happen. People come together in movements of support, action, solidarity and protest. Many of our organisations, charities and institutions were formed by volunteers. 

People have different levels of power and access to resources within communities. This will affect their experiences of volunteering. Volunteering can be a driving force in creating a fairer and more equitable society. This will require us to tackle power imbalances across society - imbalances which, at their root, are about the relationships between organisations, communities and individuals. We believe that to create thriving communities requires power to be devolved - from the state to communities, from organisations to individuals. .

Many volunteers want to help out through task-based volunteering - this is valid and valuable and will continue. Alongside this, growing numbers of people want the opportunity to shape their volunteering, share power and lead change. We want to see growth in these kinds of volunteering - which can be much more equal and redistributive.

We want volunteering to be accessible and welcoming to everyone, everywhere, so that the benefits of volunteering - to individuals and communities - are equally distributed. 

Currently, volunteering is not inclusive of all people and communities - both in terms of levels of participation and the volunteer’s experience of being involved.

Those from lower socio-economic groups are less likely to volunteer through organisations and groups than those from higher socio-economic groups. Younger, disabled, and volunteers with an ethnic minority background also report a less positive experience when volunteering through organisations and groups [1].

Volunteering is known to increase our wellbeing, our connection to others and sense of wider purpose. But many people do not feel safe or welcome volunteering in certain spaces - experiencing racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, and other forms of discrimination - this includes both formal organisations and informal groups. This exclusion reinforces the inequalities and power imbalances in our society.  

If we can make volunteering more accessible and welcoming to everyone, volunteering will be a driving force in making our society more equal. 

We want a future where collaboration is a natural, fluid, flexible and spontaneous part of volunteering.

Where people do great stuff together because they want to – driven by their shared interests or ambitions - and are proactively supported to do so by those working within the volunteering system. 

We should recognise the ability of communities to drive collaboration. We must value, and add value to, this collaboration. There should be a radical shift in emphasis towards building community-led coalitions of interest and collaborative activity, rather than creating top-down and imposed partnership working.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made many of us innovate, experiment and embrace flexibility like never before.

As the crisis abates, we must ensure that spirit is not discarded - experimentation should become a natural part of volunteering, not a temporary bolt-on.

The world continues to change rapidly. Not many saw the pandemic coming, and all of us involved in volunteering should expect the unexpected over the next decade.

We need to see the volunteering landscape as dynamic, not static. We need to ask ourselves: What opinions and structures are we holding onto too tightly? What could be done differently? We need to accept that change happens, and welcome it - without insisting on forcing it to happen for the sake of it. How can we better share insight, advice and learning? How can we embrace and spread the benefits of emerging technology?