Young people in the most deprived areas in Scotland face more barriers to accessing high quality volunteering opportunities. This paper highlights the challenges we need to address in order to create more equitable and inclusive volunteering opportunities.
YouthVIP undertook a research project to create a picture of how youth volunteering in Scotland currently looks; who is volunteering and why, barriers preventing young people accessing volunteering opportunities, and what can be done to make volunteering opportunities more inclusive, appealing and rewarding for all.
Nine recommendations were formed as a guide to how this could be achieved. A deeper dive was then carried out to specifically explore the challenges facing young people from the most deprived areas.
This paper, linking with previous work done on youth work and volunteering; and careers support, sets out key areas that must be tackled, and how the recommendations and a youth work approach are ways of breaking down some of these barriers.