The impact of volunteering on happiness, health and wellbeing

Utilising data from multiple national surveys, two reports from Jump Research explore the benefits of volunteering, including the individual and collective impact. The reports cover volunteering at events, campaigning, raising money, transport, coaching and mentoring, all of which are essential in supporting people to be active in their community.

Health, wellbeing and happiness

Volunteers in sport reported higher than average levels of wellbeing compared to non-volunteers. These positive effects come from improved self-worth, socialising and the feeling of doing something useful, this improves life satisfaction as well as positively affecting a person's general health and mental health. The relationship between life satisfaction and volunteering is comparable to lifting an individual out of a deprived neighbourhood. The wellbeing associated with formal volunteering, at least once a month, is comparable to moving from self-employment to paid employment or from cohabitation to marriage. Whilst full-time employment has more of a positive influence over general health, volunteering has been found to have a considerably higher impact on mental health compared to full time employment.

People who have the most to gain from the benefits of volunteering do in fact report the benefits being much stronger than those who have least to gain.

Different types of volunteering have differing effects on wellbeing. Employer based, informal and formal volunteering all improve an individual's wellbeing with formal volunteering having the greatest impact on improved wellbeing. This is different to volunteering in arts and culture, which wasn’t found to have positive benefits on wellbeing; volunteering in sport and activity was found to be beneficial.

The reports also highlight that the longer an individual spends volunteering over their lifetime the greater the positive impact on their happiness, health and wellbeing. More regular volunteering is linked to a higher wellbeing uplift, with the uplift effect of weekly volunteering being three times higher than volunteering several times a year. People who volunteer for longer periods of time (years) feel more of the benefits than those who volunteer for shorter time periods.

Financial and societal impact

One volunteer in sport results in 8.5 people being active who then experience the wellbeing benefits of activity. The wellbeing benefit to each volunteer is valued at £2,974 and for each of the 8.5 participants that they support to be active it is worth £1,127 in wellbeing benefits. With 3.2 million volunteers in sport, this gives a total of £53bn of economic value to the UK.

Demographics

The majority of volunteering is done by people who are middle-aged; well educated; in managerial and professional occupations; actively practising their religion and; have lived in the same neighbourhood for at least 10 years. If you live in a rural area, then you will also be more likely to volunteer.

Individuals from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups were significantly less likely to volunteer. Compared with people who are White British, they have a volunteering rate 26% lower.

The reports compare volunteering likeliness among and between ethnic and other groups and it shows that Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese and other Asian groups have 35% lower odds of volunteering than other ethnic groups.

Challenges and threats

The reports highlight that underinvestment in sports volunteering and lack of representation/diversity of board members pose a threat to engagement in volunteering.

Published November 2021