'Volunteering is so important to our society but is so often misunderstood and misinterpreted. John Mohan brings together all the evidence we have in a compelling way to tell the real story of UK volunteering and does a great service to academia, charities, policy makers and government. It's a book that has been needed for a long time.'Dan Corry, Chief Executive, New Philanthropy Capital'This long overdue analysis is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the scope and impact of volunteering. Based upon a wide-ranging review of post-war trends, policies and practice, this thought-provoking critical analysis challenges widely held views on volunteering. It ultimately questions why policy makers and practitioners alike are interested in volunteering – and provides insights into how we might support it in the future. Volunteering shouldn’t be taken for granted – and this analysis should inform volunteering policy and practice over the coming decade.'Karl Wilding, University of Kent‘Volunteering is as old as time - both universal and politically highly contested. In this insightful panoramic view, John Mohan skilfully both interrogates the debate about volunteering and at the same time promotes its real and eternal value.’Julia Unwin, Chair of Civil Society Futures Inquiry 2017-19'This wide-ranging review of the data on volunteering will be valuable for anyone with an interest in this topic. For those working with and leading volunteers, it offers an accessible route into engaging with the breadth of academic data on volunteering, and to understanding the changing policy context within which it has been operating in recent years.'Helen Timbrell, Centre for Charity Effectiveness'In this fascinating book, John Mohan undertakes an insightful and carefully researched synthesis of the evidence on volunteering in the UK, examining large-scale survey data from a range of sources, and engages the reader in thinking about participation and trends in engagement in detail, at policy and practice levels. He contextualises trends in volunteering against broader macro-level shifts in the political, social, and economic landscape of the UK since Beveridge’s report Voluntary action: a report on methods of social advance was published (published in October 1948), focusing, in particular, on the last thirty years.'Sharon Clancy, International Journal of Lifelong Education'...There is a current of wider social commentary running throughout the book with a focus not just on the position of volunteering in society but also on what the state of volunteering might actually tell us about society. This returns on several occasions to the key point that volunteering does not exist in isolation to wider socio-economic conditions that enable or constrain the ability of people to choose what to do with their time.'Daniel Haslam, Voluntas'The word comprehensive does not really do the book justice. It is jam-packed with references, examples, detailed overviews of studies (both Mohan’s own and others’), and explains both the fundamentals of volunteering (such as its definition and conceptualisation, participation rates, modern trends, benefits and impacts) alongside politicians’ engagement with volunteering, and volunteering’s social duty, such as its role during the 2012 Olympics and voluntary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mohan is to be commended for making a subject that can at times be both technical and statistic-heavy into a prose that is light and quickly-paced.'Jon Dean, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly'This book draws on the author’s extensive research experience into the voluntary sector since 2004. Much of this research was conducted while directing the Third Sector Research Centre at the University of Birmingham. The research is predominantly quantitative. Much of it involved analysis of longitudinal data sets, such as the British Household Panel Survey, to address questions such as how volunteering changes through the life course. This book is probably the most comprehensive collection of results from these surveys. Some of this research has not been published elsewhere, for example, the analysis of a ‘civic core’ – individuals who account for a disproportionate amount of voluntary work... a valuable synthesis of quantitative work on volunteering in the UK.'Geoff Nichols, The Journal of Social Policy
