The Economic Value of Volunteering in Queensland

Your conclusions are significant Steven. As policy makers, the Western Australian govt commissioned Dr Ironmonger to replicate this Economic Value research in WA last year, using the same sets of ABS stats as Qld. The value of replicating the methodology is that we (as Australians) are collecting comparative data across Australia, which is delightful for policy makers! The economic value we got in WA is big, contributing $6.6 billion per year, a PR dept's dream and, yes, persuasive for continued investment in volunteering. This state's Ironmonger report is also on our Dept's website. As the policy maker who worked with Dr Ironmonger, I had the benefit of the Queensland study and his similar studies of this topic in Victoria and South Australia back in 2002, to push our WA study a little further along in terms of commentary. But what I did want to say about measuring volunteering is that WA has recently done more research, building on the Ironmonger report, with a view to producing a new Volunteering 'Framework' (policy guidelines) for the state and local govts and community. One of the strongest themes emerging from community consultation was that volunteers sniff at measures of economic value of volunteering and wonder what all the fuss is about, when it is measures of social, emotional, creative contribution that are particularly significant in their view. Harder to measure of course. So I certainly agree with you, volunteers are not concerned about their economic contribution and many groups admitted they only trotted out the economic stats when it was time to get a grant. And yes, our volunteer consulation also supported your view that groups don't want to spend precious resources measuring their volunteering 'outputs.' So as policy makers we have listened to the volunteers and stakeholders across our state and made sure our new policy document 'the Volunteering Framework' reflects the importance of these non-economic values. We also listened to our volunteers during community consulation who did not embrace the HR type language used in Ironmonger's report and who were adament we were getting it wrong by discussing volunteering in the 'language of the paid workforce' or HR management. We will be posting an 'interim' framework discussion paper on our website from 10 January that reveals other rather sharp lessons we learned from listening to volunteers. We are currently surveying measures of volunteering among those volunteers who are in the 'hidden' groups, the unincorporated and less formal groups entirely managed by volunteers, as our community consulation also revealed that the data we had previously collected was skewed towards volunteering in groups that were larger and had paid staff. As the recent Productivity Council Report revealed, about 90% of Australia's NFP community groups are entirely volunteer-led, run and managed. So that is an area that policy makers need to give more attention to, reflecting its huge value. Without attending to it in the language of HR and economic analysis, !! that is. Cheers, Lynn Fisher