Being a volunteer has the potential to change your life. It can improve mental and physical wellbeing, help you to gain experience and offer an important sense of belonging about ‘doing good‘. Volunteering helps to support people who are marginalised or vulnerable and can make a significant impact on local environment.
Featured image © Samaritans Brighton
Praise for Brighton’s Volunteers
Already this year in Brighton, volunteer groups have made vital changes within our community. Whether it be for clearing the A27 of litter, aiming to restore Madeira Terrace, or setting up projects for marginalised and/or vulnerable groups, local people have been working extremely hard to make change, and it has paid off.
Councillor Nancy Platts, who is the Leader of Brighton & Hove City Council has expressed her gratitude for these influential residents:
“Some residents are giving up their time to help regularly at food banks, or to befriend those who would otherwise be extremely isolated, or to help support park runs and many other community events, or to join in with a litter-picking team. There are even residents who are volunteer sheep-lookerers, watching over grazing livestock!”
To mark this year’s Volunteers Week, which runs from the 1st – 7th of June, five hundred of Brighton’s volunteers have been invited to a celebration at the Amex Stadium later this month. The celebration is being run in partnership with American Express and the city’s community & voluntary sector.
“By doing all this, residents are providing vital support, and contributing a great deal to life in the city and our general health and wellbeing. This celebration is a small token of our appreciation for the contribution of our volunteers, and I really hope it is a fantastic event.”
The Importance of Volunteering
National figures show that volunteering contributed roughly £22.6 billion to the UK economy in 2015. Last year, in 2018, 20.1 million people in the UK volunteered at least once a year and 11.8 million people did so at least once a month. A large motivator for people is ‘wanting to do good’, with 46% of people saying that they volunteer to improve things and help others and the community.
There is now a clear agreement about to positive contribution that volunteering can have for people’s health and wellbeing, with one piece of research by Harvard School of Public Health even showing that “mortality rates for Americans are 24% – 47% lower for volunteers than their peers“. There are many reports that claim that people who volunteer are generally healthier, less stressed and have more stamina. The NHS even recommend volunteering on their Live Well page, stating that it can be helpful in improving mental and physical wellbeing.
How you can get involved
If you are interested in volunteering, but not sure where to begin, a good place to start is on the Councils website: Volunteering in Brighton and Hove. There many different roles available, ranging from working with young offenders, environmental community groups, sport or volunteering to gain experience.
Community Base offers a volunteer search tool, which is useful for finding opportunities to do what you value.
Volunteering Matters is the leading UK volunteer organisation, and believes that volunteering creates the opportunity to offer high impact volunteer-led solutions across the UK, in response to some of the most difficult challenges faced by individual people and their communities. The state that “everyone can play a role in their community” and that volunteering is a great way to make this happen:
“We believe that everyone can play a role in their community and should have the chance to participate; we build projects and programmes to reflect this. We focus on the needs of four distinct communities; young people, disabled people, families and older people.”
