Volunteering
10.57 Voluntarism remains the foundation principle for all charities and the voluntary and community sector as a whole. The fundamental basis of the sector is that people join together voluntarily to address a particular need and as a result all organisations in the sector have an unpaid voluntary board or management committee.
10.58 The majority of organisations also employ volunteers to deliver their services, sometimes exclusively and in some cases working alongside paid workers. Whilst the number of paid workers in the sector has increased by almost 10% since 2000, research by Johns Hopkins University 1 shows that levels of volunteering increase in proportion to growth of the sector overall. The South West has some of the highest rates of volunteering of all the English regions.
10.59 Informal volunteering can be defined as giving unpaid help as an individual; formal volunteering as giving help through groups, clubs or organisations. The Communities and Local Government 2005 Citizenship Survey found that the South West had one of the highest rates of informal volunteering with 71% of adults having participated in some sort of community and voluntary activity in the past twelve months. This level was unchanged from the 2003 survey. 2 The South West also had the second highest levels of formal volunteering (47%) although there was a slight fall on the levels for 2003.
| Government Office Region and Country |
Informal Volunteering (%) |
Formal Volunteering (%) |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
2003 |
2005 |
2003 |
2005 |
|
| North East |
58 |
60 |
33 |
33 |
| North West |
64 |
68 |
39 |
42 |
| Yorkshire & Humber |
57 |
69 |
36 |
41 |
| East Midlands |
65 |
66 |
44 |
47 |
| West Midlands |
57 |
71 |
39 |
44 |
| Eastern |
64 |
68 |
48 |
48 |
| London |
60 |
65 |
37 |
42 |
| South East |
66 |
70 |
49 |
48 |
| South West |
71 |
71 |
51 |
47 |
| England |
63 |
68 |
42 |
44 |
| Source: DCLG 2005 Citizenship Survey | ||||
10.60 Over 1.9 million adults in the South West participate in formal volunteering at least once a year. Further data from the Citizenship Survey shows that almost 1.4 million adults (33%) in the South West participate in formal volunteering once a month. With survey respondents reporting that they spend an average of 8 hours per month volunteering this amounts to almost 11 million hours of formal volunteering in the region each month. Using the national minimum wage to give an hourly rate (£5.52 from October 2007) this represents a cash equivalent of about £60 million per month or £720 million per year.