Taking a closer look at volunteers

Volunteers provide heroism on many different levels.

The General Social Survey (GSS), is an accurate form of documented evidence via the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Within the most recent GSS at the time of this post’s creation, it is estimated, that more than five million people nationally over fifteen years old provide voluntary work. That is approximately one in four people or twenty-five per cent of the entire nation of Australia.

The primary reasons that people may volunteer are for personal satisfaction and to do something worthwhile while closely followed by the need to help others and for the interaction and support of their communities.

Voluntary work within an organisational setting added almost five hundred million hours to communities in 2020 and almost six hundred million hours in 2019 (View Table 11 of the General Social Survey 2020).

The most popular organisations for volunteering are those that relate to sport and recreation, and religious groups, followed by education and training (Table 10). 

Formal voluntary work, informal voluntary work and also consideration of spontaneous volunteering are the three sectors of volunteering that are of importance when viewing volunteering in it’s entirety.

The skills and training that volunteer work can offer, interviewee skills, office-based, customer service, and digital skill sets for those entering the workspace environment, and upskilling. On a personal level, providing purpose and meaning to the workers and for them to have the ability to give an outward approach to other individuals and communities.

Volunteering can consist of roles that are face-to-face, on the field, office-based, or via the Internet. According to official statistics, education levels are also widely varied from high school level up to a bachelor’s degree or higher. Therefore providing education and also allowing the educated to share their skills.

The evidence that the volunteer sector collectively injects hundreds of millions of hours of physical labour annually in unpaid roles, is also a strong call to an unpaid volunteer culture that has the power to help keep a nation afloat in a large scale way.

Imagine for a moment, the workforce of emergency services if volunteers did not exist, or crisis support phone lines without volunteers, utilising their education and life skills to help others through life’s hardest times. Carers to the elderly and disability support volunteers providing mateship, confidence and life skills. Imagine for a moment, just how desolate some places would be if it was not for volunteers.

Image by baekmoon sung.

Think for a moment, not only the volunteers who provide customer service in some front-line retail roles but also the volunteers who openly put their lives on the line every time they are called out. Those who rescue people and animals from burning buildings, those who provide CPR to an unconscious person, and those who quell a conflicting situation. Those who are out there, on the field, witnessing situations that the human eye should not have to see.

These are the people, and volunteers at that, providing ongoing acts of selflessness to enrich, enhance, support and save the lives of others without the desire for recognition or praise.

The volunteers who step in after a bushfire to save injured wildlife, animal rehabilitation and fostering, the vets who volunteer their time to step in and help, the volunteers who raise funds and donate in times of natural disaster, and the ones who provide shelter, food and support during these times. Volunteering is a vast sector that communities are reliant on when we only have ourselves to make things happen at certain times.

Credit: ABC News

Could it be that when you help a person, you leave a bit of yourself with them, and they become you in some higher-than-earthly way? The person you helped carries your energies, and the volunteer saver has imprinted on them, a type of generational learning. Could this be the ultimate gift a volunteer could receive, to imprint on others, a moment of kindness, a life-saving act, to provide to another the grandest act of pure selflessness?

As much as a nation relies on volunteers as much as every individual also relies on them. This thought is often not considered until after someone has required a volunteer’s support. It is not much to ask for the consideration of what many volunteers do in their roles, strictly for the safety of others. Consider these absolute acts of selflessness, when others are running away from danger, these are the people who are running to danger for you, for me, and others.

These volunteers are so humble to be called a hero, they will be the last to assume that status, but they are, and if you are one of the volunteers I am writing about and you are reading this, then, you are a hero. You are part of The Hero Files.

We are all important, we all matter.