Volunteer governance
28 January 2026
Anna Barnes looks at the value of volunteers to public-purpose organisations and argues that structured, thoughtful governance is needed to support them
Volunteers have a special place in the third sector. They can have lived experience, thus offering unique insight into services being provided. They can be people who previously had a rich career but still want to find an outlet for their skills and energy without the obligations of being a paid employee. They can be people starting their careers, looking to add some experience to their CV before applying for jobs.
Volunteers bring immense value across the public-purpose sectors, but organisations need structured, thoughtful governance to fully support them.
All too often there is a lack of clarity about roles and purpose. There’s an old-fashioned notion of volunteers being middle-class people who no longer want to be in the labour market and have time on their hands, and this sometimes unconsciously leads to these roles being undervalued or volunteers being exploited. This will be especially frustrating for those people who need these roles as a stepping stone back into work or into a specific career.
I have seen at first hand extremely bright young people working in the NHS for free before applying to medical school or nursing. They are amazing and focused and learn so much from this hands-on experience, which will undoubtedly make them better healthcare professionals.
I have also seen frazzled film school graduates being asked (again) to be runners on low-budget film sets, with no pathway to guaranteed future income. This creates barriers to working-class people, who reach the limit of being able to work for free far earlier than those with more resources and connections. [1]
The value of lived experience
More positively, one of my passions is to see people who have lived experience, either from having been a mental health patient or having problems with substance misuse, picking up their lives again by volunteering in services they have benefitted from. After a shaky start, mental health services now do this extremely well and have created pathways to employment that values this experience.
I have worked with service user advocates to help resettle patients following service relocations. There is no substitute for people who have walked in your shoes. They were extremely empathetic, skilled and invaluable at a time of huge stress and vulnerability for patients. They also served as role models in the patients’ journey towards recovery. [2]
In substance misuse, we also have a proud history of volunteer and peer support for people in their journey back from addiction. The 12-Step Model [3] uses this expertise effectively, a role which provides benefit for both recipients and volunteers through the therapeutically valuable concept of reciprocity.
At Seaview, the open access day centre where I am chair, we use volunteers routinely. We currently have around 20 people who are all active in providing services. I have explored the different motivations and skills above, as I would argue that this is what makes the use of volunteers uniquely rewarding – but also challenging from a governance perspective.
Mucking in
We now employ a volunteer co-ordinator whose job it is to sift through volunteer applications and work out where volunteers sit on the role spectrum I have described above. It is a far cry from the early days when service users and volunteers were interchangeable, there was no DBS requirement, and everyone just mucked in to keep the service from falling over.
In some ways, I miss those days, when someone just out of rehab could say, ‘Can I run the kitchen this week? I used to be a chef’, but of course this was fraught with danger; people were liable to steal, they took on too much, they were not properly supervised, other vulnerable people were not protected. So yes, checks and balances (such as criminal records checks, although they do not have to be used to exclude people; they need to be taken in the round and contextualised) are vital.
I think where we sometimes fail is in unwittingly creating a hierarchy of volunteers: those at the end of their career and still working semi-professionally, and those who are still quite chaotic and need support but have potential. [4] [5] There are also those who will never enter employment but gain so much from being valued as a volunteer. There is such a boost to self-esteem in being asked to give a service rather than receiving one, although it often requires a lot of mental agility to grasp the difference and support from someone like our volunteer co-ordinator.
Our current coordinator makes sure to build relationships with volunteers, as stated by Dave Perry, the CEO: “I think the way we are able to assess and support volunteers to try various placements as part of their induction helps us to understand where they may be ideally suited to which role in the charity. We value the time they give to Seaview and aim to reciprocate by making the time rewarding for them. Our coordinator Michelle does all these things and builds relationships with each one, supporting them to achieve each one’s aspirations or goals.”
Skills assessment
I think what we need is a thorough assessment of the skills volunteers have to offer, as well as their personal aspirations and goals so that we have a good match.
Having a retired senior lecturer on our tea bar is good for getting tea served, but how much more could they help us with? Would they be more interested in being a trustee, for example? What support does the volunteer who was in care and has had several breakdowns need before they can realistically enter the job market? How can we support them to get back onto their degree course – if that is what they would like to do – for example?
Much thought also needs to be given to taking on ex-service users as staff. Some services take the view that you need a couple of years' distance from being a service user to being taken on in a service, even if you have been a successful volunteer.
We have no fixed rule at Seaview and have employed former service users very successfully, but a few have fallen by the wayside and found it hard to make the transition from receiving a service to giving a service. This is a complex issue and has much to do with trying to create a new identity and a sense of loyalty to their previous peers.
Induction and support
The process for inducting and supporting volunteers must be structured, yet bespoke according to their skills, experiences and motivations for wanting to volunteer. At Seaview it starts with an interview, completing a form with detail about skills background and interests and – of course – a criminal records check.
It is important to strike while the iron is hot, as for some people for whom this is a big step, their confidence might be fragile, so this process needs to be as straightforward and quick as possible.
I know when inducting trustees (who are also all volunteers) that sometimes it takes a while to work out where they can best be utilised, depending on their background. It would be wrong to assume that someone who previously worked in accountancy just wants to look at the books, for example. They may want to branch out and explore different areas of interest.
At a different level, the ex-service user may need a safe place to explore how the new role will affect how they are seen by their peers. Being perceived as a poacher turned gamekeeper is sometimes difficult for people, but the issue of not managing the transition can be worse, with conflicting loyalties possibly causing problems with clients who volunteer being in a position of power and authority compared to previously.
This leads us to the issue of supervision. As with managing staff, volunteers need regular supervision so that we can check if the reciprocity bargain is working for both parties. It would be easy to fall into the trap of exploiting vulnerable people if we didn’t see that they are on a trajectory where volunteering is continuing to meet their expectations and taking them where they need to go.
The terrible case of the young man with autism who volunteered for years at his local supermarket but was refused a job is a cautionary tale. He was eventually offered a paid role at another supermarket, which suggests he had been exploited as a volunteer, as he had an expectation that they would eventually take him on. [6]
To repeat, not all volunteers want to end up in employment, but we don’t know unless we provide them with structured and regular support and supervision. Volunteers are not free labour; they are partners in service delivery—and they deserve the same thoughtful investment we give to staff.
[1] Brook, O’Brien & Taylor (2020) – Sociological Research Online
[2] https://swlstg.nhs.uk/peer-support
[3] Citation: Kelly, J. F., Worley, M. J., & Yeterian, J. (2019). Twelve-step approaches. In R. A. Zucker & S. A. Brown (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Adolescent Substance Abuse (pp. 743–760). Oxford University Press
[4] Warwick‑Booth & Woodcock (2024). Volunteer listeners as co-producers of knowledge… Educational Action Research
[5] McNicol (2023). Dynamics of volunteering amongst English older adults.
