Where did everybody go?
Photo by Adolfo Felix on Unsplash
Is volunteerism going up or down? Two reports tell two stories about volunteerism trends.
Our partner, the Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN), and l’Assemblée de la Francophonie de l’Ontario (l’AFO) recently shared their latest ‘State of the Sector’ survey on the current state of Ontario’s nonprofit landscape, receiving 1500 responses, nearly half the respondents from 2021. They identified two main areas the sector needs to address:
(i) Supply & demand: demand for the services provided by the nonprofit sector is higher than ever, while inflation and operating costs are rising, and the ability to recoup revenue decreases or stays the same.
(ii) Human resources: volunteers are not returning to organizations, posing a problem considering that almost half the organizations surveyed by the ONN are volunteer-run. This is exacerbated by the general labour shortage, as well as the sector’s own specific recruitment challenges, not being able to increase salaries or incentivize in other ways with a volunteer-based workforce.
We are especially curious about this latter point - why volunteers are not returning to the sector, and if this is related to the dip in survey respondents (the responses from the year before this were nearly double). If these two things are related, what else might they indicate about the ‘state of the sector’ (hint: burnout and fatigue)?
This made us think of a report compiled by another one of our partners, GivingTuesday, which provides insight into how the pandemic encouraged shifts towards giving back in less formalized ways (think things like mutual aid groups or picking up groceries for your elderly neighbours). These alternative forms of engaging in altruism haven’t been captured by this data. This ties into the bigger problem, the narrative of decreasing volunteers is being measured and published by the sector itself, which could be seen as having a bias. If people aren’t participating less in general, but only less within formal organizations, it would tell a different story than people behaving less altruistically overall.