Volunteering After the Pandemic: - Lessons from the Homelessness Sector

The term ‘social recession’ was coined in the aftermath of 2008 to describe the parallel contraction in the voluntary sector alongside the economic recession.8 It was not until 2013 that levels of income for charities matched their pre-crisis levels from 2007.9 In contrast to the falling numbers of volunteers, the period between 2013 and 2020 saw an expansion in the role of charities which was for. [...] The increase in this form of volunteering was demonstrable; in the first month of the March 2020 lockdown, an estimated 3 million people in the UK were involved in informal mutual aid groups, and 750,000 signed up to assist the NHS in various tasks.15 This uptake in volunteering in the immediate crisis period 18 Volunteering trends and context is in line with the mass mobilisation expected in resp. [...] With the pandemic… we lost a lot of the warm, welcoming, friendly atmosphere the services used to have.” (Volunteer coordinator) A number of the volunteer coordinators and managers interviewed talked about the disjunction between volunteer experience and that of the guests, and the difficulty balancing these. [...] In a number of cases, interviewees spoke about the difference between the expectations of volunteers familiar with the ‘old’ model and the reality of the new way of working. [...] This mirrors some of the wider changes to working life and patterns since the pandemic; the rise of remote working has been beneficial for many, but some have expressed concern that the loss of physical presence also means the loss of the spontaneity of ‘water cooler moments’ which are hard to recreate artificially.4 Similarly, the open-ended nature of the volunteering relationship, and the fact t.