Northern Ireland: Young volunteers are ready for the long haul

A report, Why not ask me?, will be published next month. It contains research carried out by Young Citizens in Action, the youth arm of the Volunteer Centre for Belfast and Castlereagh, with the Volunteer Service Bureau (VSB) and the Volunteer Development Agency. It quizzed 242 young people registered with the VSB about their experience of volunteering, comparing the data with a previous study in 1998.

Young people said the main reason they did not volunteer was that they were not asked, and there was a lack of information and awareness of the benefits of volunteering. More than half (55 per cent) were interested in accreditation for volunteering and a third in training. The study also found that young people preferred volunteering in the evenings and afternoons to the weekends and mornings. Those expressing a preference for all-day volunteering dropped from 23 per cent to 11 per cent.