Why Are We Ignoring One-Sixth of the Nonprofit Workforce?

This is the first in a series of six NPQ articles that first challenge—and then change—the way we think about volunteers. In this series, The Unexpected Value of Volunteers, Masaoka takes on the underappreciated topic of volunteerism, provides some unexpected ideas, and points the way toward a public policy agenda on volunteerism.

Volunteerism is an enormous economic force, yet it is never mentioned in business schools or in economics departments.

            Walter Hoadley, former chief economist at Bank of America

Did you know that a recent federal report found that in a year nonprofits benefited from nearly five billion hours of work by volunteers? That’s the equivalent of 2.5 million annual full-time employees. Those volunteers generated labor valued at $167.2 billion, according to the 2024 AmeriCorps report, Volunteering and Civic Life in America.

Meanwhile, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that nonprofits employed 12.8 million people who earned $873.1 billion in wages in 2022 (the most recent year data are available). Volunteers, in short, whether measured in numbers or by their labor value, represent 16 percent of the national nonprofit workforce.

It’s not so surprising that volunteerism is never discussed in economics departments or in the human resources literature in for-profit companies. What is more surprising is that discussions among nonprofits about the “nonprofit workforce” often leave out volunteers entirely as well.

Nonprofit and academic literature frequently fail to mention the role of volunteers; nonprofit conferences typically lack breakouts on volunteers. Keynotes rarely mention volunteers. Foundations regularly fail to ask their nonprofit grantees about volunteers. Why?

To be blunt: Volunteerism is broken. Volunteering isn’t. (Although it’s damaged.) But the ways that nonprofits think about volunteers and support them are stale and broken.

Declining Volunteer Numbers

Until recently, most of us were largely unaware of the importance of bees to our food supply and didn’t think about bees, except to try to avoid them. It wasn’t until bee populations began collapsing around the world—threatening not only loss of biodiversity but serious damage to worldwide food crops—that many of us began to pay more attention.

In the nonprofit community, volunteers are the bees. Volunteers are not just add-on enhancements to nonprofit work. Volunteers are a sixth of our workforce. And the bees are in trouble.

The ways that nonprofits think about volunteers and support them are stale and broken.

By the end of 2021, the percentage of adults who volunteered through or for an organization plummeted in the “largest decline since the U.S. government began collecting data on volunteering,” reported the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland. This is unsurprising—that decline was because of COVID-19.

But even though volunteerism has risen sharply since the pandemic, the rate is still below pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, the long-term trend is highly disconcerting. Back in 2013, volunteerism was responsible for 26 percent of the nonprofit workforce and labor value. A decade later, that number has fallen to 16 percent.

Neglect and Disdain

Volunteer work is overlooked—and even sometimes disdained, consciously or otherwise—by many in the nonprofit community. For many nonprofit paid staff, in particular, volunteers are a necessary evil at best and a dreaded chore at worst. Here are some of the common complaints I’ve heard about volunteers:

• “I hate the fact that we have to have volunteers. Staff does the job a hundred times better.”
• “You train a volunteer and then they disappear.”
• “How did that problem happen? Oh, of course, a volunteer was doing it.”

Just as bees are essential pollinators that nurture healthy ecosystem, a strong volunteer base helps maintain a healthy civil society.

In fact, nonprofit staff have fought so long to be seen as professionals—well-educated, highly skilled professionals who deserve their pay—that we have, even if inadvertently, erased or denigrated volunteers (including, sometimes, our volunteer board members).

Our language shows the depth of this denigration. Here are some more comments I have heard:

• “We have 35 staff,” rather than “We have 35 paid staff and 85 part-time volunteers.”
• “I don’t work here. I’m just a volunteer,” a common self-deprecating volunteer refrain.
• “I don’t know why we have boards. They just get in the way.”
• “Just what we need: 100 unskilled corporate volunteers for a day. We have to find something for them to do.”
• “We only have a few staff, so we have to rely on volunteers,” rather than, “Because we have so many volunteers, we can do a lot even though we have only a few staff.”

The Essential Value of Bees

Volunteers are not “better” or “worse” than paid staff. In certain roles they can be enormously effective, and in other roles much less so. Today’s nonprofit workforce is comprised of paid staff, volunteers, and contractors. We need to look at how to maximize this multi-component workforce, not just paid employees—if we continue to take volunteers for granted the way we have done with bees, we will find our workforce threatened.

It’s not just about workforce numbers, though. It’s about our nonprofits’ collective soul.

Just as bees are essential pollinators that nurture a healthy ecosystem, a strong volunteer base helps maintain a healthy civil society. As I noted several years ago, declining volunteerism is corrosive to the animating spirit that infuses the best nonprofits. I wrote in 2018: “Let’s see ourselves in service to democratic movements, rather than as leaders and researchers of those movements.”

Alas, the corrosive effects of the nonprofit sector’s over-professionalization that I wrote about then have only accelerated since.

We are losing bees. And as a result, we are losing our connection to community as well.

Let’s take care of the bees.

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