I had the best start to my week. On Monday I spent the day with the LSE Volunteer Centre delivering Hack the Future: Mobilising Next-Gen Volunteers, alongside Chris Wade from Time for Impact and a room full of brilliant people working in volunteering.
There were loads of great ideas, lots of Post-its, some excellent pitches and, most importantly, lots of conversations about how we make volunteering work better for young people.
But I think everyone who attended would agree that the highlight and absolute golden section of the day was listening to the LSE students tell us about their experiences of volunteering, the good, the bad and the barriers.
We had a panel of five LSE student representatives and volunteers, hosted by Chris: Amara, Iris, Noor, Ardour and Emily. We asked them about their experiences of volunteering, what had brought them into it, what kept them coming back and what might put other students off.
And if I had to sum up what I heard, it would probably be this:
Young people want to help, sometimes we just need to give them the space and resource to do it their way.
Amara first got involved during Covid while she was in sixth form. She could see people in her community becoming isolated, so she and others started finding ways to help – shopping, going for walks with people, walking dogs, whatever was actually useful.
Ardour talked about coming into volunteering through campaigning for LGBTQ+ and trans rights. They saw issues that felt personal to them and wanted to take action, not only for themselves but for other people experiencing the same things.
Neither story starts with an organisation advertising a volunteer vacancy.
It starts with “there is something happening around me that I care about, and I want to do something about it.”
And we can see that reflected in some of the data we'd looked at earlier in the day. The Community Life Survey found that 28% of 16–24-year-olds take part in informal volunteering at least monthly, compared with 24% of adults overall.
Young people are already helping people and getting involved in their communities. Sometimes the opportunity for organisations isn't to tell them what needs doing, but to ask:
What do you care about? What change do you want to make? And how can we help you do it?
Purpose was a big theme, but so was connection.
Iris talked about starting to volunteer after moving to the UK. She began teaching Chinese to students whose first language was English: taking something she already knew she could offer and using it to connect with people in an unfamiliar community.
Noor also talked about the importance of connection, and across the panel there was a real sense that volunteering could provide somewhere to meet people, build confidence and gradually take on more responsibility.
There was another lovely thread running through several of their stories too.
Amara had benefited from gymnastics as a child. Ardour had been part of a theatre group. Emily had been involved in uniformed youth organisations. As they got older, they wanted to become the people providing those experiences for somebody else.
That's volunteer recruitment hiding in plain sight.
Sometimes your future volunteers are already in your organisation. They're the young person attending your programme, participating in your activity or benefiting from your services now.
Are we creating pathways for them to stay, grow and eventually lead?
Seems obvious, but something that needed be said again and again by our panel.
Volunteering gave them something completely different from studying. It could be somewhere to switch off, meet people, build confidence and enjoy themselves.
Ardour was particularly clear that fun was one of the things that kept bringing them back. And perhaps we need to talk about that more.
We can get terribly earnest about volunteering. Impact. Skills. Employability. Community. Outcomes. All important.
But people are allowed to volunteer because they enjoy it.
In fact, if we're asking somebody to give us their time for free, creating an experience they actually look forward to feels like a fairly reasonable part of the deal.
Something else that came through really strongly was reward and recognition – but not necessarily reward in the way we might immediately think about it. A huge part of it was simply being able to see the difference they'd made.
Ardour talked about a child they'd worked with through their theatre group who wouldn't speak in their first session, but by the end was getting up and performing whole scenes by themselves. Amara talked about hearing directly from people she had supported during Covid about the difference it had made, and seeing that work become something people talked about within the community.
This is something organisations can be much more intentional about. We collect impact data. We hear stories from service users. We know when a programme has achieved something brilliant. Are we actually feeding that back to the volunteers who helped make it happen?
But they also talked about the more tangible stuff. Being thanked. Going for a really lovely meal together. Certificates. Badges. Something they can take away and use to demonstrate what they've contributed to a future employer or another organisation.
None of those things need to be huge or expensive. They're simply different ways of saying we noticed what you did, it had value, and we're glad you were here.
Again, this is something we saw in the research we'd looked at earlier in the day. 49% of 18–24-year-old volunteers say recognition is important to them, compared with 40% of volunteers overall. Yet only 69% of young volunteers feel sufficiently recognised, compared with 82% of volunteers overall.
Perhaps sometimes we assume that volunteers can see their impact because we can see it.
They can't always. So tell them.
Show them the numbers. Share the feedback. Tell them about the person who came back for another session. Celebrate the milestone. Give them the certificate. Do something to show you care about the time they gave.
When Chris asked about negative perceptions of volunteering, the students said there is an idea that volunteering is gruelling work: doing the jobs nobody else wants to do.
If that's what somebody pictures when we say "volunteer", we've got a marketing job on our hands. (We aren’t making it seem very fun!)
There was another perception which felt particularly relevant at LSE.
Students are surrounded by opportunities they're told will help their future careers: internships, placements, jobs and "spring weeks". Noor talked about the constant experience of applying for things and the fear of yet another rejection.
For students who come to LSE from a state school background and hadn't even known about some of those routes before arriving. For them, volunteering had provided another way to develop experience and skills while contributing to causes they cared about.
As Ardour put it:
“Having a Volunteer Centre is changing that narrative and getting students more involved.”
There's something important here about how we communicate volunteering. For students, volunteer organisations can be competing with opportunities that are much more explicit about what the student will gain from them.
That doesn't mean we need to start treating volunteering like an unpaid internship, but perhaps we do need to get better at showing young people what they can get from volunteering too.
Emily gave us what I think might be one of my favourite ideas from the whole discussion.
Rather than always expecting students to find a pre-designed volunteer role and prove that they're suitable for it, wouldn't it be great if they could approach an organisation and say:
“These are my skills. How can they help your charity?”
Students bring languages, creativity, digital skills, research skills, lived experience, networks, interests and knowledge that may never appear on our volunteer role descriptions.
Maybe sometimes our job isn't to recruit somebody into the box we've already made. Maybe it's to find out what they can bring and build something together.
And then we hit the practical reality.
Ardour studies and has two jobs alongside everything else they're doing. They spoke about shrinking student finances and how much students are already trying to fit into their lives. They still want to volunteer.
But wanting to volunteer and being able to fit a traditional weekly commitment into your life are two very different things.
Someone on the panel described the word "volunteer" as sounding like “someone who just has a lot of time.”
Oof.
If that's the image we've created, we've designed volunteering for a privilege that many people simply don't have.
And this isn't really a student issue. It's a parent issue. A carer issue. A shift-worker issue. A disability and health issue. A cost-of-living issue. A working-two-jobs issue.
Flexibility isn't a just a youth-engagement technique. It's an inclusion issue.
Noor raised another question she considers when looking at organisations:
Can I see people who look and feel like me here? And what are people who look and feel like me actually doing?
Not just whether there is a diverse photograph on the recruitment page.
Who are your volunteers? Who are your volunteer leaders? Who gets listened to? Who progresses? Who is visible?
Belonging starts before somebody applies. People are already looking for signals about whether this is somewhere they can imagine themselves.
One of the big themes of our Hack the Future day was designing volunteering with young people rather than simply designing something we think young people should want.
Students want to make change. They want connection. They want to contribute their skills. They want opportunities to grow. They want to give back to communities that have given something to them.
And they want to have fun.
What they don't necessarily have is endless time, endless money, endless enthusiasm for another lengthy application process or an automatic understanding of why volunteering might be worth prioritising over everything else competing for their attention.
We spend a lot of time asking “How do we get more young people to volunteer?”
But after listening to these five students, I think there's a better question:
What are young people already trying to change – and how can our organisations help them do it?
Because the five young people sitting in front of us had already found plenty of reasons to give their time.
Our job is to make sure the way we do volunteering doesn't get in their way.
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