It’s Volunteer Week. A time to celebrate the incredible contribution volunteers make to our communities. In the housing sector, volunteers are everywhere.
You’ll find them:
- Running community gardens and food banks
- Organising social events
- Welcoming new neighbours
- Giving up their evenings to sit on boards or scrutiny groups
These aren’t just “nice to have” roles. Volunteers in housing are changing lives. Often, they’re residents. People with deep insight, a wealth of experience, core skills, and a fierce commitment to improving their communities.
Who Volunteers?
Not a single “type” of person. Volunteers can be:
- Retired residents with decades of housing experience
- Working people finding time around shifts
- Young people building their skills
- Community leaders stepping up
- Parents juggling everything but still showing up
Volunteering in housing is often unpaid, emotional labour, driven by a sense of justice, belonging, and wanting to make things better. That’s powerful stuff.
Should ‘Volunteering’ Be Free?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when we rely on tenants to do the work of scrutiny, governance, and service improvement, we should be paying them.
Scrutinising performance, sitting on boards, designing services, these are complex, strategic, and time-consuming roles. If we’d pay a consultant or a board member to do it, why do we expect customers to do it for free?
Volunteering should be optional, positive, and personally fulfilling. But when we ask residents to take on responsibility without pay and call it “engagement” while professionals around the table are salaried, we risk reinforcing inequalities.
Paying customers for their expertise isn’t charity. It’s respect. It’s a recognition of the value they bring. And it opens the door for more diverse voices to participate not just those who can afford to.
Volunteering has its place. But meaningful participation in decision-making deserves more than a thank you gift card and a sandwich. It deserves investment.