This week is National Volunteering Week. Nearly two million adults in England contribute at least one hour a week to volunteering in sport, helping with everything from coaching to admin to event support. Two million is a lot, and the impact those volunteers can have is huge.
But there is a strong case to be made for working to increase that number even further. Inactivity is one of the biggest public health issues facing the UK: far too few people are regularly active every week. One way to increase activity is to increase the availability of community and grassroots sports programmes. The easier it is to exercise, the more likely it is that participation will increase. Similarly, the lower the cost of participating in sports, the more likely it is that activity levels will rise. Participation is lower among lower socio-economic groups, with the poorest households spending an average of as little as £2 per week on physical activity. Due to a lack of funding, grassroots programmes usually rely heavily on the time and enthusiasm of volunteers. Get more people volunteering in sport, and there will be more opportunities available for participating in sport. Utilising volunteers also keeps costs low, and participation cheap. The more opportunities available, and the lower the costs, the more likely it is that people will join the ranks of the regularly active. And that has benefits for everyone, both individually, and economically (as outlined in UK Active’s “Turning the Tide report“)
Whether or not grassroots sport should have to so heavily rely on volunteers is open to debate. Given the benefits of increased activity levels, both in terms of improvements in health, as well as the broader impact on education, employment, and the economy, perhaps more public money should be directed towards additional staffing for grassroots sports programmes. Perhaps Public Health England and Sport England should be promoting and funding grassroots sport to an even greater degree, to make it both more widely available, and cheaper, thereby increasing participation and improving public health.
More investment would help, but to employ the full time equivalent of the almost two million volunteers currently active in sport would cost around £2bn a year, at median wages. While the economic and societal gains that could be made through this approach are huge, even with an increase in investment it would be impossible to fully negate the need for volunteers. The cost of replacing them all with paid employees would be simply too high to ever be fully achievable.
So for now grassroots sport must rely on volunteers. And where Sport England and Public Health England can still have a big impact, for significantly less than £2bn, is in helping community sports programmes to recruit, and train even more volunteers. By committing to support grassroots organisations in managing their volunteers, and by promoting volunteering in sport, public bodies can still work towards improving activity levels, and in doing so improve the health and wellbeing of both individuals and society as a whole.
Florence Morton
Sporting Speak 