By Bonnie Chiu, Managing Director, The Social Investment Consultancy

I love volunteering.

At school, I ran the social services club. We organised volunteering opportunities for students in care homes and children’s centres, and we did street fundraising. Volunteering wasn’t framed as impact or strategy. It was simply part of how we participated in the world.

Then I grew up and started working professionally in the charity sector. And somewhere along that path, I began to notice a quiet tension: the more “officially” I worked in civil society, the more it seemed that volunteering was thinning out and shrinking?

The structural shift in volunteering

The evidence suggests that this isn’t just anecdotal. In England, regular formal volunteering (through groups, clubs and organisations) has fallen over the past decade. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Community Life Survey 2023/24 shows that the proportion of people volunteering at least once a month declined from 27% in 2013/14 to 16% in 2023/24. That’s 40% decline over the past decade.

The same survey identifies work commitments as the most commonly cited barrier to volunteering, followed by people saying they “do other things” in their spare time.

Work is taking more of people’s time, and what remains is increasingly organised around consumption. Volunteering is not only competing with other good causes; it is competing with an economy that increasingly monetises and optimises free time.

Alongside this decline in participation, there is another shift. In 2024, Pro Bono Economics, highlighted that estimated paid hours in civil society exceeded volunteer hours: around 726 million paid hours compared to 688 million unpaid (volunteer) hours.

We call it the voluntary sector, yet the balance of labour is tilting towards paid work. What does this mean?

Volunteering once embedded people in routines of collective responsibility. But increasingly, many of us may participate in civil society, primarily as donors. And as donors, we receive newsletters and impact reports. We choose causes as we might choose brands.

If participation becomes primarily financial, civil society risks becoming populated by audiences rather than participants.

The rise of the “memberless” model

A parallel trend I have become more conscious of — through the thought leadership from the Stir to Action team — is the growth of what might be called a “memberless” civil society.

“Civil society is a broad term, often used to represent the activities of organisations outside of government, but its constitution has changed significantly in recent decades. A large increase in charitable NGOs and memberless organisations, has been accompanied by a widespread collapse of local democratic participation and social infrastructure.”

Increasingly, many charities are structured around beneficiaries, funders and professional staff, rather than members. They are accountable upwards to regulators and funders, and outwards to service users, but not necessarily inwards to a body of people who collectively own and shape the institution.

Membership is not just a database category; it is an institutional layer for generating political agency, shared identity and embedded accountability.

When participation becomes easy to enter and easy to exit, what has been described in civic theory as a more “gaseous” form of engagement, mobilisation can be rapid, but durability becomes fragile. We can assemble quickly, but we struggle to hold.

Questions of legitimacy

These trends raise the question of legitimacy.

If volunteering is declining and paid labour rising, what exactly do we mean by “voluntary”? If civil society is increasingly memberless, on what basis does it claim to represent, mobilise or speak?

And as professionalisation deepens and financial logics expand, how do governance structures, including charity boards, grapple with membership, representation and democratic accountability? And finally, what is the role of civil society, amid shrinking freedoms and civic spaces?

If the voluntary element is thinning, what replaces it as the moral and democratic foundation of the sector? If membership is weakening, how do we rebuild durable forms of belonging? If paid labour is rising and volunteering falling, how do we ensure that civil society remains a site of collective agency rather than simply a delivery infrastructure?

This blog series is not an attempt to romanticise the past or argue that professionalisation should be reversed.

It is time to ask whether we can build civil society that is future-capable: adaptable, legitimate and durable.

The starting point is simple. If we are serious about the future of civil society, we have to confront a difficult possibility: the voluntary sector may no longer be as voluntary as we assume.