“It’s good for the soul”: Stories of Volunteering

Written by Lauren Wallace-Thompson of People’s Voice Media, the Vision for Volunteering’s learning and evaluation partner

What made you get involved in volunteering? Was it a cause close to your heart, or a reason to leave the house? Did you want to meet like-minded people, or fill a gap in your CV? Did you have a burning passion for junior cricket, or did you just stumble across an advert online?

The Vision for Volunteering have been working with People’s Voice Media to use stories of lived experience of volunteering to understand more about what volunteering is like in the here and now.

We’re doing this through a method called Community Reporting. This involves volunteers and people working with volunteers telling their own stories in their own words. We train people within the volunteering community as Community Reporters, then they conduct informal, unstructured peer-to-peer interviews to gather stories of lived experience of volunteering.

In this blog, we take a look at the findings in two key areas that have emerged so far: people’s reasons for getting involved in volunteering, and the idea of volunteering as a “two-way street” that brings great benefits to volunteers themselves as well as the beneficiaries of their time and support.

What makes people want to volunteer?

As we might expect, one thing that emerged was that having personal experience of a cause made people want to get involved in volunteering for that organisation. One volunteer manager with experience in a hospice tells how “the largest motivation was for people giving something back, so they had had a personal experience of the hospice, and their loved one being cared for by them and that was very much why they were volunteering.” Another person describes how they like to ‘volunteer for causes that personally affect me or that affect people I know”.

Volunteering can be a route back into employment for people who have been out of work for a period of time. For one storyteller, volunteering was a “pathway back into paid employment”, though they also valued the opportunity to meet other people and broaden their mind. Other people talked about getting involved in volunteering as a way to “build my own self-esteem back up” and “make good use of whatever talents and skills I’ve been lucky enough to have”.

Volunteering also allows people to follow interests that they might not be able to pursue in their day jobs. “The reasons I’ve chosen to volunteer when I have done is to get involved in things that I’m interested in anyway,” says one storyteller, “to have direct experience in something I find really fun and enjoyable, something I probably wouldn’t be able to do in a paid capacity.”

People also talked about volunteering as a way to avoid boredom and avoid isolation. “I like to be busy” said one storyteller, while another described starting voluntary work as a way to “get me out of the house” and stop them being “stuck in a rut”. This was echoed in another story from a volunteer in a charity shop:

“Honestly, just get out of the house, change of pace. I work from home so it’s just nice to take a day in the middle of the week, get out. It gives me an excuse to put on nice clothes or some lippy! Something to do, get out, meet people.”

The stories also show that happenstance also has a role to play in activating people to volunteer. One storyteller described the moment they saw an advert in the local library to help in hospital radio, they thought “oh, that sounds fun”, then applied to get involved. That was the start of over 12 years of volunteering!

Volunteering is a two-way street

The idea of volunteering as a “two-way street” is something used by some of the storytellers themselves. By this they mean that, although volunteers are freely giving their time and labour to support a cause or their community, they experience significant benefits and positive impacts themselves from their volunteering. As one volunteer says “it’s not purely altruistic. I do things because I enjoy doing them.”

Confidence

One of our observations was just how often the word “confidence” came up in the stories we watched! One storyteller describes how volunteering “has given me so much confidence”, especially being able to interact with the people that came into the cafe. Another reflected that the “mutual care” and “humanity” of volunteering build self-efficacy, helping people to meet other challenges in their lives. A storyteller who had had a gap in employment described their “sense of improved self-confidence and valuable experience for other future employment”.

Pathways to employment

Volunteering as a stepping-stone into paid work appears as a feature of several of the stories. One person described how volunteering had helped them “successfully integrate back into a working environment”, while another storyteller was encouraged to apply for a paid role with the organisation they were volunteering for after just a few months. “It gave me the confidence to get back out to work,” they said, describing how the staff at the organisation had learnt about their degree and experience and “recognised…that I had the qualities to work as a senior support worker”.

As well as employment, storytellers describe how their lives were changed in other material, practical ways by volunteering. For example, one person discusses how their volunteer role “changed a huge amount” in their life. It put them into contact with people living in a local housing co-op at a time when they themselves were experiencing an unstable housing situation “so I ended up finding a place to live, which was amazing. That was a huge thing that came from volunteering”.

Connection and community

This benefit of volunteering was summarised beautifully by one storyteller who said, “you build up your own social group of friends and it’s all part of feeling, building your roots within your community”. Volunteers and volunteer managers alike spoke about “meeting other people”, “building good relationships”, “maintaining good social skills” and “making new friends”, suggesting that the networks that people build through volunteering are important to their wellbeing and prevent social isolation.

People talked about these not just as individual relationships, but often referenced them in the context of “community”. One person running a volunteer centre discussed the “mutual sense of care” fostered through volunteering, while another volunteer who had immigrated to the UK described how their experiences had helped them get more involved in their immediate community and neighbourhood.

Making a difference

Related to this sense of community and getting involved in a cause was the “feeling of making a difference”. Lots of storytellers mentioned this as one of the key benefits they felt from volunteering and how it had a positive impact on their mental health. One person describes how their favourite thing is to “see the difference that I’ve made, even if it was really small things”. Another volunteer highlighted the pleasure of “seeing the value and hopefully the benefit that it brings to our community”, saying that this felt “satisfying”.

People sometimes linked these positive feelings to their own mental health. One storyteller said they feel “empowered” and “instantly rewarded” by helping others, going on to describe how small acts of care and kindness helped with their recovery from depression and anxiety.

Conclusion

There’s much, much more for us to say about the incredible insights into volunteering that we’ve gathered through the stories so far. We’re hearing what makes a good volunteer manager, what the barriers are to volunteering, and some of the conflicting demands that crop up in volunteering in the 2020s - like the demand for flexibility vs the needs for safeguarding. We will be exploring these more fully in learning reports and future blogs. You can watch all of the stories we’ve collected so far on the Community Reporter website.

We want to collect lots more stories like these and get people from a diverse range of backgrounds involved! If you’d like to share your own volunteering story, please contact sarah@visionforvolunteering.org.uk. We’re looking for positive and negative experiences, and are especially keen to hear from people who are volunteering with a disability, people from communities with lived experience of racism, and people who are members of the LGBTQ+ community.