Denis Moriarty: Australia's not-for-profits need volunteers

The Australian community sector is circling the drain. It's facing a trilogy of terror: demand for its services is way up, its funding is trending down, and volunteering has dropped off a cliff. A central element of Australian society is being swept away, and nobody's facing up to what's going to be needed to fix it.

Australia's always been a place where you can count on people to pitch in in an emergency, from fires and flood at one end of the scale to "Grandmothers for Refugees" (I saw them in the street last week - amazing superstars) at the other end.

We've volunteered for good causes at an impressive rate and supported an enormous infrastructure of not-for-profit organisations. As recently as 2010, 36 per cent of Australians - rather more than a third - volunteered with one of the nation's 600,000 community groups.

By 2014, the Australian volunteering rate had fallen to 31 per cent, and by 2019, to 29 per cent - a drop of 20 per cent in 10 years. More specifically, involvement in purely social groups had dropped by 20 per cent, in community support groups by 25 per cent, and in political and civic groups by a blistering 50 per cent. That's bad enough - but that was before COVID. When the pandemic hit, two out of every three of those volunteers dropped out. Some of them have come back, but many are gone for good.

The COVID-19 Community Sector Impact Survey, released last month by Our Community in partnership with the great technology enabler Salesforce, found that more than half of not-for-profits reported an increase in demand for services, with organisations providing family violence, homelessness, food relief and childcare services particularly hard hit. At the same time, a majority of organisations reported a sharp decline in both volunteers and donations.

This isn't a seasonal fluctuation, or a blip in the chart. It's a massive undermining of Australia's basic assumptions. Our entire social compact is at risk.

The federal government has to take some responsibility for this. It's always willing to praise community in the abstract, but when it's faced with the needs of actual community groups it tends to draw firm lines between good ones (private schools and sports clubs in Coalition electorates) and bad ones (environmentalists, animal welfare groups, universities, and anyone else who tells it what it doesn't want to hear). Its only policy contribution so far has been an incessant barrage of increased paperwork along with occasional spiteful stabs at increased government dictation. That isn't going to work.

The not-for-profit sector makes up about 11 per cent of Australia's workforce. We need an industry plan to support its development (and ensure its survival). We need a minister for the not-for-profit sector in Cabinet. We need less state and federal bureaucracy, more tax breaks for charitable donations, a bloody big investment to allow the sector to invest in technology and reskill its workforce, and, above all, a government that's prepared to listen.

Mind you, I don't want to shove all the burden over to the government. Community groups have to get up from being tasered and get back in the game. The sector has to unite to make its voice heard to government rather than being picked off one at a time.

Community boards need to look inward, too. We have a limited time to become more diverse, more responsive, and more tech-savvy. A large part of the fall-away in volunteering is due to the rise of the mobile phone as the primary mode of social engagement, and we're going to have to come to terms with that (if you've got any suggestions on that front, give us the word at service@ourcommunity.com.au).

Some community work can be moved online, but quite a lot can't. Even if you could deliver meals on wheels with drones, a drone wouldn't be able to have a friendly chat with a lonely citizen. If people at risk of suicide are put on to Alexa or Siri instead of a real person, I don't think it would help. So it's not just the government that needs to step up, or the community groups, it's us. Now I have your attention, it's you.

You care deeply about lots of things; I've read your tweets. If you want those things to happen you need to organise it, or, even better, join one of the organisations working on the topic now. Join in! It'll do wonders for you. Volunteering's health benefits are one of the most securely established facts in human research. Join Landcare, for example, and you'll save an unusually precise $403 annually on your doctor's bills. Why is it that Australians will take any crank's advice on an all-quinoa diet but won't add years to their life by joining up as volunteers? Spend a little time now, get back more later.

It's a wicked problem, and we have to attack it at all levels. We have to have a national plan, and governments (of any colour) that can carry out that plan. We need groups that can fight for the right (well, ideally the centre left). We need, each of us, to reach out, speak up, and join in. Now!