Overcoming Barriers to Volunteering: A Discussion Paper

Volunteering provides the basis for a very large number of community organisations that meet important needs in the community, such as running children’s and adults’ sports clubs, churches and other faith-based communities, mums and toddlers groups, and a great array of interest groups. If these groups cease to exist, or shrink in scope and activities because they cannot get the volunteers that they need, the community will be the poorer for it, increasing the problem of loneliness and social disconnection, amongst other adverse consequences.

Volunteers also supplement the work of paid staff in a variety of community welfare organisations that are substantially funded by governments. In this way, they alleviate the pressure on government resources and, in the care economy, improve the quality of life for residents and clients of these services. As the Productivity Commission has observed in its report on philanthropy, volunteering also “creates indirect benefits for society by contributing to social networks, building social capital within communities, and diffusing knowledge and innovation.” The federal Government, through the Department of Social Services, and in partnership with Volunteering Australia, has developed a national strategy to increase volunteering. The premise of the national plan is that more volunteers are needed to keep existing organisations running and to meet a variety of community needs. One element of that plan is a cross-government approach to encourage volunteering. That has also been proposed by a parliamentary committee in Queensland. In similar vein, the Productivity Commission recommended that governments at all levels explicitly consider the effects on volunteers when designing policies and programs. However, some legislative changes made in recent years have made volunteering harder, not easier; so more work needs to be done by different levels of government to understand the unintended consequences of well-intentioned law reform.