Volunteering offers a route out of social exclusion. As volunteers, people are able to have an input into how their local community and wider society operates. For people unable to work, volunteering is a chance to do something meaningful with their time, and for those wanting to return to work it represents a route to employment, enabling them to build up skills and experience.

OSW did a piece of research looking at the effect volunteering could have on homeless people's lives. The people we surveyed reported that volunteering had helped them:

• Meet new people;
• Gain experience;
• Gain communication skills;
• Test out new areas of work;
• Gain confidence;
• Improve their CV;
• Get training;
• Get a reference;
• Develop a routine; and
• Tackle stigma.

Volunteering is very flexible. Volunteer roles can be anything from full time, to a couple of hours a week, to one-off opportunities; so it is easy to fit volunteering alongside other activities and to choose the level of commitment that suits the individual. There is a wide range of roles from hands on support, through to admin, arts and more physical sports and environmental roles. Volunteering does not effect people's benefits, so it is something that people can try out without there being any risk, if they decide it's not for them, they've not lost anything.

Most importantly, if someone volunteers, then they are gaining benefits like experience and increased confidence at the same time as helping someone else:

"With volunteering I can contribute something to society whilst developing my skills and experience" - volunteer

We have found that this is a real boost to people's self-esteem:

"If you were to walk down the road and meet someone and they asked you what you'd been up to, it's quite a big thing to be able to say 'volunteering'. It gets you out of that circle of feeling worthless" - volunteer

For more information you can download the full Homeless People and Volunteering (128 Kb) research report.

If you are homeless and would like to find out more about volunteering, you can read OSW's Volunteering Guide (88 Kb).

At the end of OSW's volunteer development project we carried out research looking at the experiences of 24 people who had found volunteering via the project. The resulting report - Gaining Experience Giving Time (386 Kb) - explores the impact volunteering had on their lives and looks at ways volunteer involving organisations can create more accessible and sustainable opportunities.