As my accompanying email said, thank you for your commitment and support to the Club. We could not do what we do, and we would not be what we are, without you.
Volunteering may have started out as a necessity – and that remains the case – but it is also part of our DNA; a defining aspect of the life and spirit of the Club. It is one of the things that sets us apart and is something we should all celebrate.
I was curious, though, to learn more about the role of volunteers at other organisations especially, who else depends on volunteers to deliver their services?
My suspicion was that the Club is, if not unique, certainly unusual in the extent to which it relies on volunteers to operate. We are open seven days a week from 10 in the morning until 10 at night (with some minor variations). We have a full- and part-time staff team who are responsible for much of our day-to-day operations: reception, marketing, sales, bar and catering, maintenance, and tubing. But all the skiing and
snowboarding, which are the dominant feature of the Club and its ‘raison d’être’, are delivered by volunteers. These volunteers are selected from amongst our members. They have chosen to step up and support the Club by donating their time and skills.
They deliver lessons and coach sessions, covering recreational, freestyle and racing. There are sessions for children, sessions for older members, dedicated female sessions, and sessions for those with additional needs. Volunteers are absolutely critical to our operations and fundamentally represent our values by giving back, supporting each other, and making a contribution that is meaningful.
What other organisations rely on volunteers? Do any have a similar relationship with their volunteers?
Here I hand the reins over to Claude. As I noted in my email, I have not checked the outputs, so please take what follows with a pinch of salt in case anything is not 100%. It may draw on old(er) data, it could be an inaccurate summary based on extrapolation / pattern recognition, or it may be a full-on hallucination with no basis in fact.
The Big Picture
An estimated 14.2 million people in the UK volunteered through a group, club or organisation at least once in 2021/22. In England alone, around 27% of people aged 16 and over volunteered formally at least once a year, and about 16% — roughly 7 million people — did so at least once a month.
On time commitment, the median time given by volunteers in the past four weeks was eight hours. Around two-thirds (67%) of recent volunteers reported volunteering at least once a month, and the most frequent volunteers — those giving time at least once a week — made up 39% of all recent volunteers. The typical committed volunteer is giving roughly two hours a week, though a significant minority give far more.
In terms of what motivates people to volunteer, the most popular cause to volunteer for is local community or neighbourhood groups, with about 21% of recent formal volunteers giving their time there. Health, disability and social welfare volunteering comes second at 17%, with hobbies, recreation, arts and social clubs third at 16%.
Youth Organisations: Scouts, Guides and Youth Clubs.
This is one of the most substantial areas of volunteering in the UK. Each week, over 400,000 young people and 100,000 adult volunteers take part in Scouting projects and activities at the heart of the UK’s communities. These volunteers run weekly section meetings, organise camps, manage groups and provide the leadership without which the movement simply could not function. Scouts has 145,000 adult
volunteers, not counting 20,000 Young Leaders. Girlguiding operates on a comparable model with a similarly large volunteer base. The time commitment is typically one evening per week for section leaders, plus occasional weekends for camps and activities — probably 4–6 hours a week for the most active.
Armed Forces Charities: The Poppy Appeal and Salvation Army.
The Poppy Appeal is one of the UK’s largest annual volunteer mobilisations. The Royal British Legion relies on 59,000 Poppy Appeal collectors and volunteers who dedicate their time each year to fundraising across the country. The time commitment varies enormously — from a couple of hours shaking a tin outside a
supermarket to the year-round role of a Poppy Appeal Organiser who coordinates a whole community. Being a Poppy Appeal Collector is very flexible; many volunteers offer a couple of hours at a local supermarket or community location, while others help across several days of the appeal. The Salvation Army similarly relies on volunteer helpers at soup kitchens, food banks, charity shops and fundraising events throughout the year.
Emergency and Rescue Services
RNLI: Most lifeboat crews are unpaid volunteers, operating more than 400 lifeboats from 238 stations. The RNLI has over 8,800 volunteers in total. This is one of the most demanding volunteer commitments in the UK — crew members must be available at any hour, in any weather, and undertake extensive and ongoing training.
Mountain Rescue: There are 48 volunteer mountain rescue teams across England and Wales alone. Teams look to recruit around six new members a year, requiring training in nine core skills including outdoor first aid. These volunteers are on call and can be deployed at any time, committing many hours of training as well as operational time.
St John Ambulance: St John operates across the UK with tens of thousands of volunteers providing first aid cover at events — from village fetes to Premier League football matches — as well as training the public and running NHS-aligned community responder schemes. Volunteer first aiders typically give one evening a week to training and attend events at weekends.
Health and the NHS
Before the pandemic, an estimated 100,000 volunteers were contributing to NHS trusts alone, and this number grew dramatically: during the pandemic more than 400,000 people took part in the NHS Volunteer Responders programme. There are over 300 different volunteering roles available in the NHS, ranging from volunteers who sit with patients at end of life, to volunteer doulas supporting vulnerable women
through labour, to those who help with signposting in a busy hospital. A typical hospital volunteer gives a regular weekly shift of three to four hours, usually on a rota basis.
Emotional Support: Samaritans
Samaritans receives around 10,000 calls for help each day across 201 branches in the UK and Ireland, with approximately 20,000 volunteers delivering this lifesaving service. Listening volunteers are expected to give one regular shift plus one night shift every five weeks, each shift being around four hours. The training alone takes several months. This is one of the most psychologically demanding volunteer roles
available.
Advice Services: Citizens Advice
Over 14,000 highly trained volunteers support the delivery of the Citizens Advice service. Volunteer advisers go through substantial training before working directly with clients on issues from debt and housing to employment rights and benefits. Without trained volunteer advisers, Citizens Advice could not continue to meet demand for advice.
Sports Coaching and Club Administration
This is numerically the largest category of all. Sport England data shows approximately 6.7 million adults volunteer in sport, of whom 1.7 million are volunteer coaches or instructors and 1.2 million are volunteer referees or umpires. The vast majority of grassroots football, cricket, rugby, tennis, swimming and other sports clubs in the UK are entirely dependent on volunteer coaches, referees, committee members, treasurers, kit washers and fixture secretaries. A grassroots football or cricket coach might give 4–6 hours every weekend during the season plus midweek training sessions.
Conservation and Heritage: National Trust, RSPB and Wildlife Trusts
The National Trust has around 50,000 volunteers who assist with everything from welcoming visitors at historic houses to conducting bat surveys and restoring dry-stone walls. The RSPB and the network of Wildlife Trusts across England operate similarly, relying on volunteers to carry out practical conservation work, lead public events and monitor wildlife. Commitments vary from occasional working weekends to
regular weekly involvement.
Cultural Institutions: Museums, Galleries and Theatres
Many of the UK’s most beloved cultural institutions depend heavily on volunteers. The British Museum, Natural History Museum, V&A and countless regional galleries and local museums use volunteer guides, invigilators, event helpers and archivists. Community theatres and arts organisations frequently use volunteers to run front of house, manage box offices and support productions. Commitment is typically a few hours a month to a day a week.
Schools: Parent Governors and Friends Of Groups
Every state school in England is legally required to have a governing board, made up almost entirely of volunteers — parents, staff, community representatives and local authority appointees. There are an estimated 250,000 school governors in England, making governance one of the largest single categories of skilled volunteering in the country. Friends of School groups organise fetes, discos, quiz nights and other
fundraising activities, drawing on a much wider pool of occasional volunteers.
Where your Club may genuinely be unusual
The comparisons above are all compelling, but each has a meaningful difference from your situation. In your Club, the volunteers are members themselves, people who both benefit from the club and choose to give back to it. That reciprocal, community-within-a-community dimension — where those receiving the service also deliver it — is harder to find at scale.
The closest structural analogy is probably the traditional British grassroots sports club (cricket, tennis, rugby), where clubs exist mainly to allow members to play a sport and are completely reliant on management by volunteers. But most such clubs do not have a professional paid workforce running the peripheral functions as yours does — they are typically volunteer-run throughout. Your club inverts this slightly: professional staff for the support layer, volunteers for the core activity.
So the honest verdict is: your club shares the volunteer-for-core-delivery model with some prestigious organisations, but the combination of paid professional infrastructure plus member-volunteers delivering the dominant activity plus the breadth and inclusivity of provision (disabilities, children, gender-specific,
recreational, competitive) does appear to be relatively uncommon, if not quite unique.
A Note on Trends
One cautionary finding worth mentioning: some key volunteering activities have fallen significantly since 2019, including raising money or taking part in sponsored events (down from 11% to 6% of volunteers) and organising or helping to run an activity (down from 14% to 7%). The pandemic disrupted volunteering networks in ways that have not fully recovered, which makes the robustness of your club’s volunteer model all the more noteworthy by comparison.