Connecting Our Community

Our volunteers - Part One by Lee Quinn

Where do you start with Healthcare Volunteer Work? Well, there are Friends Groups in hospitals, then there is the work that includes supporting the elderly, with an ageing population and many elderly people cut off from their communities, improving the lives of older generations, delivering meals, helping with shopping, and so on. Some considering employment in counselling choose to volunteer to get an idea and experience. Where would we be without the Samaritans?

A voluntary group can be a small organisation, a charity, a society, a not-for-profit organisation, a club or in some ways a team with a goal to achieve. Some come together weekly, some monthly, some quarterly and some once or twice a year.

Many of the larger charities have a paid CEO, directors, management team, paid staff, many of them essential to the organisation, which can include employed fundraisers and marketing people. But at ground level, a lot of the time the front line is volunteers.

To some, the Voluntary Sector is the Third Sector. To be honest, I’ve always viewed sectors as either private, public or voluntary.

We have Environmental Voluntary work which generally includes Conservation, Farm work, and Climate Change. There is Animal Voluntary work that includes Animal Rescue and Care, and Wildlife Conservation. Social Voluntary work includes teaching, working with children and youths.

Community Development Volunteering is defined usually as social groups of people working together towards a common goal to build a stronger community, and it can include skills across many voluntary sectors. It can be distributing food, shelter for the homeless and clothing and education. It could be welcoming migrants and refugees, supporting victims of domestic violence, or be people coming together during floods.

Then you have sports and leisure voluntary work, and at the top end you have major sporting events like the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Regional marathons; then at a local level, you have grassroots sports clubs that are run entirely by dedicated volunteers. Closer to home, think of the marshals, the Lions, the Rotary, the agricultural show committees, and event organisers.

Other types of volunteering work include joining the board as a treasurer or secretary, helping to organise social events, refereeing, managing the equipment or player registrations.

The NCVO (The National Council for Voluntary Organisations) produces an Almanac as detailed on their website, but for those not online it explains:

The Almanac is the definitive publication on the state of the voluntary sector in the UK. It is used by the ONS, cited by the media and referenced by sector leaders, policy makers, journalists and academics. This year’s publication is primarily based on charity accounts for the financial year 2019/2020. This helps us to understand how prepared charities were going into the pandemic, the initial impact as the country went into the first lockdown, and what state they might be in going into the cost of living crisis.

From thier report in October 2022, I would like to share the following:

There are 165,758 voluntary organisations in the UK (2019/20), an increase on the previous year. The voluntary sector has a workforce which is almost

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