Evaluation of the Volunteering Futures Fund
Evaluation of the Volunteering Futures Fund, a £7.4m fund to support volunteering opportunities for young people and those experiencing barriers to volunteering
Applies to England
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This research was conducted by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).
This report evaluated the Volunteering Futures Fund (VFF), a £7.4 million UK Government fund designed to support a range of volunteering opportunities for young people and those experiencing barriers to volunteering.
The evaluation aimed to understand several key aspects: how the Fund was designed, set-up and delivered; key lessons across the funded projects and across different volunteering models; the impact of the Fund on improved volunteer recruitment and retention, and the diversity of volunteers recruited; and the impact of the Fund on the outcomes for volunteers and organisations and the volunteering sector.
The overarching hypothesis for the VFF was: ‘Young people and people who face barriers to volunteering take up new volunteering opportunities, build new skills, improve their well-being and broaden their social networks, as a result of organisations targeting diverse groups, providing better support to volunteers, and offering new ways of volunteering’. The evidence gathered as part of this evaluation supports this overall hypothesis.
The evaluation found that VFF did have a positive impact. Over the course of VFF funding, voluntary and community organisations recruited 15,136 volunteers (who were new to the organisation), 43% (6,508) of whom were volunteering for the first time. There was strong evidence that the programme achieved its objectives in two out of five areas: supporting a diverse range of individuals into volunteering and enabling local projects to improve the health and wellbeing of beneficiaries and volunteers.
This report was commissioned under the previous government. As a result, the content may not reflect current government policy, and the report and findings do not relate to forthcoming policy announcements.