Because Someone Has To Show Up
People occasionally ask why I volunteer, and it's a perfectly fair question.
After all, like most people, I already have a job, a collection of responsibilities, a perpetually optimistic to-do list and a growing number of reminders from my calendar asking whether I have completed tasks that I had entirely forgotten existed.
Finding additional ways to occupy my spare time would not appear to be a pressing requirement.
Yet over the years I have found myself saying yes to volunteering in all sorts of different ways. Today I'm fortunate enough to serve as the trustee Chair of Friends of Butser Ancient Farm, and as a trustee of both Petersfield Counselling Service and The Sustainability Centre, alongside volunteering as an HIV peer mentor for people who have only recently received the same diagnosis that changed my own life twenty years ago.
On paper, those roles have very little in common. One helps preserve an extraordinary place where history is explored by doing rather than simply reading. Another helps ensure that people can access counselling when life becomes overwhelming. A third works to protect the landscapes, wildlife and communities that future generations will inherit. Peer mentoring is different again, because sometimes it isn't about solving a problem at all. It's simply about sitting alongside somebody whose world has just been turned upside down and helping them realise that, frightening though it feels, life does carry on. In many ways, it's about trying to be the person I wish I'd been able to talk to in 2006.
Perhaps that's why I've never thought of volunteering as a single activity. Whether it's helping preserve a piece of our past, supporting somebody through one of the hardest moments of their life or raising money for projects thousands of miles away, the thread running through all of it is remarkably similar. It's simply people giving what they can, where they can, because they think it might make somebody else's day, week or life a little better.
The older I get, the less I think there is a single answer to the question, "Why volunteer?"
Part of it is gratitude, part of it is curiosity and part of it is a belief that, if you're able to help even in a small way, it's usually worth trying.
Mostly, however, I think it comes down to something simpler.
Professionally, I've spent much of my career working alongside organisations trying to improve services, support communities and make limited resources stretch further. As a trustee, I've watched charities tackling problems that are too complicated, too expensive or simply too overlooked for anybody else to address.
The more time I've spent around those organisations, the more convinced I've become that society works rather differently from how most of us imagine. What I've learned is that there are gaps everywhere.
There are people who need support, projects that need funding, communities trying to solve difficult problems with limited resources and opportunities that simply disappear if nobody steps forward to make them happen. Sometimes governments can help and sometimes businesses can too. Often they do, but there are also countless situations where neither can provide everything that's needed.
That is where charities and volunteers quietly appear. Not because they have all the answers or can solve every problem, but because somebody decides to show up.
Somebody answered the phone.
Somebody organised the food bank.
Somebody visited the lonely neighbour.
Somebody ran the support group.
Somebody raised the money.
Somebody gave up an evening, a weekend or a small piece of their spare time because they thought it might help.
Most of the time, meaningful change begins with somebody deciding they will be that somebody.
I've never once walked away from a day of volunteering thinking, "I wish I hadn't bothered."
There have been long meetings, frustrating days, difficult decisions and evenings when I'd much rather have been sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea.
Yet I've never regretted turning up.
I suspect that's because volunteering has an extraordinary habit of giving back rather more than it asks for.
One of the things volunteering in South Africa taught me in 2016 was that extraordinary things are often built from surprisingly ordinary acts. A volunteer turns up, a donor contributes, a community leader gives their time and a charity quietly holds everything together. Individually, none of those things looks particularly dramatic. Together, they can change lives.
That lesson has stayed with me ever since and it is certainly one of the reasons I'm heading to Zambia. I don't imagine for a moment that three weeks of volunteering will change the world. The world is far too large and complicated for that.
What I hope it might do is make one small corner of it a little better.
That may not sound particularly ambitious, and it certainly isn't glamorous. Yet when I look around at the charities, community groups and volunteers I've encountered over the years, that is almost always how meaningful change begins. Not with grand plans or heroic individuals, but with ordinary people quietly deciding to show up.
Then quietly deciding to do it all again tomorrow.