CAF finds volunteering up, despite ‘tumultuous’ year.

Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) have recently published the CAF UK Giving Report 2017. The report provides giving and volunteering data collected during regular interviews throughout 2016.

For this year’s publication, CAF has – for the first time since starting reporting in 2004 –  collected data on a month-by-month basis. This has allowed at least one headline-worthy conclusion: the Brexit referendum in June and other ‘tumultuous’ economic events of 2016 had no immediate impact on giving in the UK.

Another major insight from CAF’s data for the year is that volunteering has gone up in 2016 – 17% of respondents said they volunteered for a charity in 2016, up from 13% in 2015.

Based on GivingForce’s own work with FTSE 100 companies and their employees, we believe that the increase in volunteering in 2016 is not a random observation, but a trend that is likely to continue in upcoming years.

The idea that time spent volunteering is time spent learning (e.g. as recursive learning to complement formal training) is not limited to the corporate world. For this reason it is no surprise that CAF has found that students are the group most likely to have volunteered in the last year (23%).

Maximilian Weidlich