The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Caledonian Exchange, 19A Canning Street, Edinburgh EH3 8EG.
Volunteering opportunities
Behind this pillar of Scottish society is an infrastructure that supports volunteering. This includes dedicated and passionate volunteer managers and coordinators, in both paid and volunteer roles. It also includes local Third Sector Interfaces and umbrella bodies (like Volunteer Scotland and SCVO) who support the sector. This infrastructure helps make volunteering happen - it ensures that volunteers have an enjoyable, rewarding, and fulfilling experience, and keeps volunteers safe and protected in delivering their volunteering roles. Fair Funding is required to ensure that volunteering is sustainable and inclusive; that we understand who volunteers and why, the difference they make, and remove the barriers to wider participation.
Our Volunteering Manifesto echoes SCVO’s call for Fair Funding. We need fair and sustainable funding for third sector organisations to ensure that anyone who considers volunteering can volunteer and have supported, meaningful, and appropriate experiences. And that we can demonstrate the impact of volunteering, so our policymakers and funders continue to invest in it. We are cautiously optimistic that volunteer participation in Scotland is showing early signs of recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis. However, without Fair Funding this recovery will stall, and inclusion gaps will widen, excluding the very people who have the most to gain from volunteering.
Fair Funding for the third sector is crucial for our work to create a nation of volunteers strengthening Scotland’s communities. Without volunteers, there is no community.
The volunteers we recruit are unaware of our funding situation
Volunteering is not just crucial to the work undertaken by the tens of thousands of voluntary organisations and charities in Scotland, it is also crucial to Scotland’s economy. As the Scottish Household Survey sets out, in 2022 46% of Scottish adults volunteered in some capacity, up to 48% in 2024, giving over 300 million hours of their time and contributing an estimated £5.3 billion to the economy.
Despite these impressive stats - and the Scottish Government’s own aims to encourage and raise the profile of volunteering in Scotland through the Volunteering Action Plan - Wave 11 (Autumn 2025) of the Scottish Third Sector Tracker continues to portray an area that remains hugely testing for the sector, with volunteer shortages now considered the top challenge faced by organisations (42%). 62% of organisations now report challenges in recruiting volunteers, with 41% stating that they face a difficulty in retaining volunteers – a 4% increase over the previous 12 months. And with the SCVO Workplace Survey highlighting that 1 in 4 volunteers are currently considering leaving their roles, it is hard to see where the much-needed improvements are going to come from.
When organisations were asking by the Third Sector Tracker what actions they had taken to improve recruitment and retention of volunteers, one in five said they had taken no action due to additional barriers. 37% of those said that this was due to financial constraints, with 24% reporting that uncertainty about the future of their service provision was the main reason.
“Funding is often short-term, uncertain, and project-specific, which makes it very difficult for us to plan ahead or sustain vital services,” explains a community-based charity providing volunteering opportunities to tackle poverty, isolation, and inequality. “The lack of security creates stress for our team and anxiety for the people who rely on us. This uncertainty can prevent us from retaining skilled staff and makes it harder to recruit volunteers, as we cannot guarantee continuity.”
“We do not advertise that we only get funding year to year to our clients and volunteers as this would unsettle them,” admits a national charity delivering grassroots services. “The volunteers we recruit are unaware of our funding situation; we continue to deliver the service as if we will be there forever.”
But as with so many challenging areas within the voluntary sector, the introduction of Fair Funding would have a markedly positive impact on volunteering, giving organisations the security and sustainability to both recruit and retain volunteers by ensuring the capacity and resource to invest in positive volunteer experiences. As outlined in Volunteer Scotland’s 2026 Scottish Parliament Election Manifesto, Creating a Nation of Volunteers, Fair Funding would ensure “that volunteers have supported, meaningful and appropriate volunteering experiences”.
“For our members – 70% of whom are volunteers – Fair Funding would create a fairer, more sustainable touring infrastructure,” says a small charity supporting live performances in the Highlands and Islands. “Volunteers would benefit from better access to funds and proportionate, flexible support.”
As the national charity that does not advertise its annual funding cycle to volunteers states: “[Fair Funding would mean] better calibre of staff, more security, better morale, more development, and the ability to expand our services.”
Food Train
Food Train is a charity helping older people across Scotland, offering members practical help to eat well, age well, and live well at home for longer. Teams of dedicated Food Train volunteers provide vital services helping older people affected by ill health, frailty, and disability. The vital services provided by the organisation include a weekly shopping service, a regular meal share service, various befriending options, and, in a few areas of the country, help with household tasks and access to library books.
The organisation, however, faces a number of funding-related issues. Food Train remains significantly reliant on statutory and commissioned income, which, while essential, creates exposure to external pressures and results in a significant proportion of income remaining restricted to specific services or programmes, reducing the organisation’s ability to invest in innovation, infrastructure, and preventative work, and limiting responsiveness to emerging need. In addition, there are little or no inflationary uplifts built into this funding and many funding streams are secured on an annual basis, creating ongoing uncertainty and a need to devote capacity to the year-on-year application process.
It is within these circumstances that there has been a reduction in total income, driven not only by a tightening funding environment but also by the cumulative impact of standstill statutory funding settlements, rising operational costs, and increasing demand. There are also challenges regarding maintaining consistent income across multiple streams and the inability of voluntary income to provide the consistent, long-term support needed to underpin sustainable growth, due to it being largely secured through short-term funding cycles and competitive processes.
The organisation is, of course, not simply waiting around on the Scottish Government bringing forward the urgently needed improvements to the funding landscape. Food Train has, instead, finalised a strategy that will put fundraising in a central role within the organisation in order to expand its reach, invest in prevention and innovation, and strengthen its national influence. It’s through this work that the organisation has developed a vision to build a sustainable, diversified, and resilient fundraising model that will enable long-term planning, support strategic growth, and reduce reliance on statutory funding, while meeting a number of objectives, including strengthening its volunteer capacity.
But even with that strong strategy, bright vision, and series of objectives to work towards, Food Train still finds itself at the mercy of an unfair funding landscape when it comes to accessing statutory funding, even if the reliance on that funding is proactively reduced. Without inflationary increases and multi-year funding commitments, organisations like Food Train are being asked to do more, for more people, with effectively less resource each year.
The organisation continues to undertake incredible work across Scotland, while taking steps to ensure that its funding is more fair, sustainable, flexible, and accessible. But without drastic improvements to statutory funding, the organisation will continue to suffer from a lack of security and stability upon which its renewed fundraising model can be based and its objectives achieved. This will only mean that Food Train is unable to keep pace with growing demand, limiting the number of people who can be supported, increasing waiting times, and placing further strain on already stretched health and social care systems.