In its current strategic plan VNZ has identified as one of its key focus areas the promotion of youth volunteering – to encourage and facilitate young people between 12 and 24 years to become volunteers. It is intended this should include those young people who are described as being at risk.

VNZ recognised that any successful strategy to encourage and enable more young people to volunteer will require the collaborative effort of many agencies from the non-profit, government and business sectors.

In the non-profit sector there are those organisations which work with youth and/or who bring them into volunteer and leadership roles as well as others which want to recruit young volunteers but find this difficult to achieve.

• Government agencies include those involved with youth and the community sector, eg the Ministry of Youth Development, Office for the Community and Voluntary Sector, the Ministry of Education as well as those with their own volunteer programmes.
• Business would bring the corporate social responsibility perspective and, equally importantly, expertise and resources needed for developing effective strategies for transitioning to a broader volunteer model that includes such factors as experiential volunteering and the use of social networking.

 Hence, VNZ is working on creating an alliance on the national level which would include representatives from the organisations outlined above. As a first step, VNZ is preparing a workshop at which the participants will discuss ways in which they could work together and seek to identify the key elements of a strategic plan and the next steps to be taken.

The workshop, sponsored by IBM is to take place during Volunteer Awareness Week 2010 and more information will be published on our Upcoming Events webpage.

Background information

New Zealand census data from 2001 and 2006 indicates that while many young people do volunteer, as a group, fewer volunteer proportionally compared with older age groups. At the same time, international evidence shows that when young people  

are encouraged to volunteer they continue to do so and to carry on volunteering throughout their lives.

Data from the Study of the NZ Not-for-Profit Sector showed volunteers make up 67 percent of the non-profit workforce. Young people are going to be needed to ensure the sector has a strong volunteer base for its future capacity and capabilities. Several government services also have significant volunteer input – conservation, prison services, community policing being a few examples.

Those young people who volunteer come to it with different strengths and different expectations from the generations who have gone before them. For young people it is the experience which is important; they are more attracted to short term assignments. Causes, local and global, are important as are opportunities to use today’s technology, both for social connecting and as a tool for volunteering. While there are volunteering opportunities which offer what young people are seeking, many non-profit community organisations find connecting with young people very challenging.

Young people benefit from volunteering as well as making a contribution. On a practical level they can gain skills, knowledge and experience which they can take through into paid employment and their everyday life. It helps them to grow as people and learn the meaning of doing things for others – the value of good citizenship. Through volunteering young people can meet new people and make new friends.