A good investment with strong economic outcomes 

Volunteering delivers significant quantifiable economic value, and its decline is costly. In Victoria alone, the value of volunteering was $58.1 billion in 2019 with 2.3 million Victorians over 15 years of age undertaking volunteering, donating over 500 million hours.

The pandemic and bushfires revealed that volunteers are the invisible workforce on which Australia’s economic and social wellbeing rests. Two thirds of volunteers stopped volunteering during the pandemic, amounting to a loss of 600 million hours p.a. of volunteer work (ANU 2020).

Additionally, there is a long-term trend of declining volunteering participation rates. Volunteering isn’t free; it doesn’t happen seamlessly or naturally; it requires expertise and infrastructure such as volunteer resource centres to support and maintain momentum. 

The Commonwealth Department of Social Services recommends volunteering has potential to contribute to social cohesion if funding is at an appropriate level and with ‘bounded flexibility’, see more in the NNVRC Report.  

 In 2020, Volunteer West leveraged $1M additional funding for volunteer-to-job cohorts and have been able to: 

• Participate in multiple workshops 

• Made numerous formal and informal submissions 

• Run an advocacy campaign lobbying for national policy focussing on place-based volunteering support structure 

 To showcase our advocacy efforts, we request your support with the following viable levels of funding: 

• Volunteer Management Activity funding to be increased to an average of $31.85 million p.a. over 5 years. 

• For a centre like Volunteer West, an increase from $117K3 to $612.5K 4 p.a. establishes a minimum viable operational platform to support one of the largest regions (covering 6 LGAs with 880,000 people) in peri-urban growth corridors.

Next read about the Research on Public Health, Volunteer Management and Partnerships →