About Reach Volunteering
Reach Volunteering is the leading skills-based volunteering charity and the UK’s single biggest source of trustees for the voluntary sector. They inspire, support and connect social purpose, non-profit organisations and volunteers to work together, sharing skills and expertise to create a thriving, fair and sustainable society. Through their online platform, people volunteer to share their professional skills with good causes while charities and not-for-profits find volunteers and trustees with the expertise to help them thrive.
Reach Volunteering enable charities and groups to bring in expertise they could not otherwise access – from trustee positions to technical and creative roles, and from core skills like digital marketing to specialist areas like agronomy or AI. They help people to find impactful opportunities to volunteer their expertise, inspiring them through their campaigns, and network of partners. In this way, they generate new resource for the sector.
Reach Volunteering's Challenges
Civil society is facing a perfect storm of rising costs, challenging recruitment, falling income, growing demand, and increasing complexity. Trustees and volunteers with expertise have an important contribution to make but unfortunately, the sector is also experiencing its lowest-ever volunteering rates and a growing number of small charities are reporting volunteer recruitment as a major organisational concern.
Reach has seen a surge of new volunteers signing up, in response to the pandemic and the onset of the cost of living crisis. Pre-pandemic, their service generated under 8,000 applications a year for trustee and volunteer roles. Last year, it was an astonishing 27,524 applications. The challenge is to support already stretched organisations to see the opportunities, to connect with a wide audience of potential volunteers, and to foster rewarding and impactful relationships.
Reach Volunteering's Achievements / Goals
In 2023, Reach Volunteering signed up 13,000 new volunteers, supported 27,000 applications for trustee and volunteer roles and recorded over 4,500 placements.
Reach converts people’s intention to volunteer into action, and generates an estimated £55 million worth of skills-based volunteering every year.
The volunteers make a significant difference to the organisations they join:
- Through Reach, charities recruit trustees with skills their board is missing, such as finance or digital expertise. Reach applicants also bring much-needed diversity, being more likely to identify as coming from a global majority community and as LGBTQI+ than the UK population.
- Charities and groups use our service to increase capacity and capability by sharing specialist expertise into small teams, and building capacity to deliver a charity’s mission
- Supporting new / marginalised groups: In the last few years, a growing number of small groups – often led by and for groups facing structural disadvantage – have been using Reach to get started, or to grow. We act as a crucial networking tool for these groups, who often don’t have the same access to professional networks as their peers.
“Reach has helped us find some fantastic volunteers to support our work, including photographers, HR experts and fundraisers. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today!” The Sleep Charity, a national charity empowering the nation to sleep better.
“Reach has been invaluable in helping us get started… we easily recruited two Trustees, a Graphic Designer, a Website Designer, a Copywriter, and a fundraising Bid Writer. Each one has brought much-needed expertise and helped us grow much faster than we had initially anticipated.” The Lunch Club, a microlocal group tackling food insecurity and loneliness.
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