Not for profit volunteer push

THE labour shortages plaguing the broader economy are being acutely felt among businesses that depend on a volunteer workforce.

‘Volunteers wanted’ signs have been posted on op shop windows, while the annual Dragon Boat Regatta in Broome was cancelled due to a lack of volunteers.

Before COVID, the national volunteer workforce was about 3.6 million people, according to the Australian Charities and Not for Profits Commission 2019 Charities Report.

However, at the height of COVID health concerns, many charities stopped their programs to look after the health of their volunteers and participants.

Data from the ANU Centre for Social Research & Methods showed two out of three volunteers stopped volunteering at some point in 2020.

Now, not for profits are struggling to attract volunteers back to their organisations.

Recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2021 census shows a 19 per cent drop in volunteering since the last measure in 2016.

However, the reduction in volunteering rates is the continuation of an emerging trend.

Prior to this, in the six years to 2019, there was a 22 per cent reduction in the number of people volunteering.

Volunteering WA chief executive Tina Williams said the pandemic had exacerbated an existing decline in volunteers.

“There has been a reduction in formal volunteering, volunteering through an organisation, and we have seen that happening for the past six years,” Ms Williams told Business News.

“That’s not new.

“But I think what is new is the rate it’s speeded up.”

Ms Williams said the move was due to a changing society.

“I think there’s this shift towards a ‘me’ focus, instead of a ‘we’ focus,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily because people are doing things wrong or volunteering-involved organisations are doing things wrong, it’s just that people want to volunteer differently.”

Ms Williams said more traditional volunteer roles were becoming harder to fill, especially those requiring high levels of training and ongoing weekly commitments.

On the ground St Vincent de Paul Society WA Inc is among the organisations actively recruiting volunteers.

The not-for-profit hopes to fill about 600 volunteer roles in the state. Vinnies WA executive manager social enterprise, Carl Prowse, said some of the organisation’s retail outlets were closed at times during the week because of volunteer shortages.

“There are still some stores that aren’t trading on Sundays for full days because we don’t have enough volunteers,” Mr Prowse told Business News.

The lack of volunteers meant paid employees and existing unpaid staff were picking up the slack, he added.

“When we’re getting a huge amount of donations coming through the door, there’s only half the people on the floor, they can’t physically sort through all the stock that’s donated,” Mr Prowse said.

He said this stock was then transported to Vinnies’ distribution centre, where paid staff sorted through the donated items.

From there, it was trucked to the stores to be sold, meaning the items were handled twice.

Mr Prowse said while the organisation had lost volunteers for health reasons or struggled to attract them back after lockdowns, the biggest fall away in volunteers at Vinnies was due to the organisation’s (previous) mandatory vaccination rules and a pausing of mutual obligation requirements for people accessing schemes such as JobSeeker.

Work-for-the-dole schemes were put on hold at various stages during the pandemic for health reasons.

Mr Prowse said the organisation’s mandatory vaccine policy meant some job-active organisations – those organising mutual obligation placements – would not place jobseekers.

Now Vinnies WA’s mandatory vaccination policy had been lifted and mutual obligation programs were operating, Mr Prowse was hoping more jobseekers would return to volunteering roles.

He said Vinnies WA had launched a social media campaign to recruit volunteers, was advertising in print media and encouraging people to volunteer with friends, as that normally led to higher retention rates.

A new approach

It’s a similar story at Uniting WA.

The organisation’s volunteer engagement adviser, Elaine Healy, said Uniting WA had faced challenges securing and retaining volunteers.

She said workforce-wide labour shortages had pushed people who might have volunteered, such as retirees or people looking for work experience, to use their skills in paid employment roles.

Uniting WA takes on about 300 volunteers a year across its operations, with 100 engaged at any one time.

It is currently searching for about 50 volunteers.

However, Ms Healy was hoping changes to its volunteer program would prevent the challenge from becoming a larger issue.

“The landscape of volunteering is changing, and we have to change with it,” she said.

While volunteering opportunities had been made more flexible to appeal to broader groups of people, this had led to more people being needed to meet demand.

“It used to be that we would ask people to give a weekly commitment of three hours,” Ms Healy said.

“Now, because people are quite time poor, the commitment can be a bit more sporadic.

“We are looking at giving people fortnightly options to volunteer, monthly options to volunteer, which means we need to recruit a higher number of people to cover the same amount of work.”

The organisation has made other changes to its processes to make volunteering more accessible, including offering more flexible opportunities and focusing on the enjoyable aspects of volunteering.

Demographics Ms Healy said Uniting WA was targeting young people for its volunteering opportunities by offering one-off, impactful opportunities for groups of friends.

Volunteering WA launched a similar program late last year. It ran a campaign to recruit volunteers from December 2021 to March 2022, called VWA Volunteer Society.

The campaign ran across YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and Instagram and partnered with popular social movement Cold Nips and Perth clothing brand Oli.

The campaign encouraged people to volunteer with friends and offered opportunities to learn new skills and expert roles for those who wanted to share their skills.

According to the organisation, the campaign resulted in more than 500 people aged 21 to 30 signing up for volunteering activities.

Corporates were also a target for Uniting WA. Instead of having a corporate volunteering day once a year, Uniting WA was considering changing its program to enable more opportunities.

“The hope would be that corporate teams would come along in smaller groups to volunteer and help address the challenges we’re facing now,” Ms Healy said.