What the 2025 State of Volunteering Report Means for Your Club

I have spent enough years on the athlete side of a boat club to know who actually makes a club run, not the committee title on the website, but the person doing timesheets after work, the parent roped into the canteen roster within a fortnight of joining, the treasurer answering emails at 11pm because that's the only quiet hour they get. So when Volunteering Victoria released its first State of Volunteering Report since 2020, I read it looking for confirmation of something I already believed. Clubs aren't running out of willing people. They're running out of ways to make volunteering easy.

I was right. The numbers still surprised me.

If you sit on a club committee, coordinate volunteers, or are trying to work out why it's harder than ever to fill roles, this report is worth ten minutes of your time. Here's what stands out, and what it means for how your club plans ahead.

The headline numbers

Victoria's volunteer base is bigger than most people assume. 3.3 million Victorians, 58.9% of the population aged 15 and over, volunteer in some capacity, together contributing more than 732 million hours a year. Encouragingly, young people are leading the way at 69.4% of Victorians aged 15 to 24 volunteer, the highest participation rate of any age group.

So the willingness is there. The problem isn't a lack of interest, it's what happens once people say yes.

Why volunteers step back

The report is candid about the friction. For people already volunteering, the biggest limits on how much they can give are work or study commitments, the cost of volunteering itself, and lack of transport. For people who aren't volunteering yet, the barriers are different again with low confidence, not knowing how to get started, and not being able to find opportunities that are visible or well matched to what they want to do.

Layered on top of that is something sport administrators know all too well, the administrative burden. Working with children checks, unclear expectations, and clunky onboarding processes push people away before they've had a chance to contribute. The report is blunt about the fix. The pathway into volunteering needs to be simpler, and organisations need to remove friction wherever they can.

The national picture backs this up

It's not just a Victorian story. The Australian Sports Commission's volunteer research segments the population into ten groups, five actively volunteering, five not, based on what actually motivates them. The active segments range from people helping because a friend or family member asked, through to people volunteering for the social connection and enjoyment of it, right up to people who genuinely give for the sake of giving. The common thread across nearly all of them. Sport volunteers usually arrive through a personal connection, themselves, their kids, or their friends and family, not through a recruitment drive.

And once they're in, they tend to stay. Sport club volunteers report high satisfaction with the experience (89% extremely or somewhat satisfied) and most say they intend to keep going (92% likely to continue over the next 12 months). Read those two numbers together and the strategic priority becomes obvious retention, not recruitment, is where the leverage is. It is far cheaper and far more effective to keep the volunteers you already have than to keep replacing the ones who burn out.

What this means for community clubs

None of this is unique to any one sport. It's a structural, sector-wide problem, and it shows up in club committees everywhere as the same handful of exhausted volunteers doing the treasurer's job, the grants applications, the working with children checks, the social media, and the governance paperwork, usually all at once, alongside their actual jobs and families.

The report's own conclusion is that closing this gap isn't about finding more willing people. Nearly half of current volunteers already say they plan to volunteer more in three years' time. It's about making it easier to say yes, and lightening the load once people are in the role including better systems, clearer pathways, and support that takes real tasks off volunteers' plates rather than adding another policy for them to implement.

Where Strive Sport fits in

That's the gap between what your volunteers have to offer and what your systems currently ask of them, and it's exactly what a few of Strive Sport's services are built to close.

The Club Health Check is the place to start if you're not sure where the volunteer load is actually heaviest. It runs across six domains, Direction, Governance, People, Finance, Members, Operations, and it's rare for a club to come back weak everywhere. Usually there are one or two domains quietly absorbing most of the pressure, and knowing which ones means you can fix the actual problem instead of adding another generic policy nobody reads.

The Strive Sport Webinars (the current Spring Series runs fortnightly on Wednesday starting in September through to November) include a session built specifically around volunteer recruitment and retention, alongside others on governance and running better meetings. At $40 for a single session or $400 for a club access pass covering up to five committee members, it's a low-commitment way to bring practical tools back to your next committee meeting rather than reinventing them from scratch.

The Club Development Program goes further for clubs ready to restructure properly: workshops, tailored support, a governance review, and a 3-year strategic plan, built to reduce reliance on the same three or four volunteers doing everything. This is the option once a club knows it needs more than a single fix.

The opportunity

3.3 million Victorians already give their time to their communities, and most current volunteers want to give more. That's not a shortage of goodwill, it's an infrastructure problem. Clubs that invest now in taking pressure off their volunteers will be the ones best placed to hold onto them.

If you want to understand where your club's volunteer workload is heaviest, get in touch with Strive Sport at strivesport.com.au, or register for the current Spring Webinar Series session on volunteer recruitment and retention as a first, low-commitment step.

Sources: Volunteering Victoria, State of Volunteering Report 2025 (stateofvolunteering.org.au, volunteeringvictoria.org.au/state-of-volunteering-vic). Australian Sports Commission, volunteer market segmentation research (ausport.gov.au/clearinghouse/research/market-seg/volunteers). Service details from strivesport.com.au/servicesandprograms, /clubdevelopmentprogram and /strive-sport-webinars-1.