Volunteering

We're committed to supporting, enabling and celebrating volunteering in all its diversity. Volunteering is someone spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or someone who they're not closely related to.

Volunteering must be a choice freely made by each individual. NCVO doesn’t broker or place volunteers in charities directly but we have a selection of resources to help you find a suitable opportunity.

NCVO's main information and guidance offers a range of resources on volunteer management - practical and step-by-step guidance to help you manage volunteers and the process of volunteering wel

We run training courses on volunteer management throughout the year. Take a look at the different courses we do by viewing our training.

Investing in Volunteers award is a quality standard specifically for excellence in volunteer management.

We also run bespoke consultancy on a variety of volunteering themes. Find out more about our consultancy and how to get in touch.

The Big Help Out is a campaign to showcase how volunteering benefits both communities and the people who take part. The long-term aim is to get more people volunteering who traditionally don’t consider it.

The campaign launched with a national day of volunteering on Monday 8 May 2023 which engaged 6 million people. There is now a Big Help Out app to connect people with volunteering opportunities all year round.

Learn more about how to get involved in the Big Help Out.

NCVO with partners, National Association for Voluntary and Community Action, Volunteering Matters, the Association of Volunteer Managers, launched the Vision for Volunteering in May 2022.

Find out more about Vision for Volunteering and how you can get involved.

Our National Volunteering Forum brings together volunteer-involving organisations and volunteer infrastructure bodies from around England to discuss issues of shared concern, feed into NCVO’s policy positions and to network. We run two events every year which are open to members.

Step on Board trains and helps senior employees and leaders take up trustee roles on boards of charities and other organisations.

Find out more about the Step on Board programme.

NCVO works to positively influence the external environment on behalf of the voluntary sector. One of the ways in which we do this is through our policy and research work.

We have developed a strong evidence base on voluntary sector issues and work with our members to influence government and other decision-makers.

• NCVO UK Civil Society Almanac provides statistics on volunteering and the voluntary sector.
• Read more about NCVO's policy work around volunteering.
• Time Well Spent is a major report on the volunteering experience based on a national survey (10,000+ respondents)