Investigating the challenges affecting rural volunteering in Australia
ARC Linkage project Developing a National Rural Volunteering Roadmap (2025-2035) investigates the challenges structural, geographic, organisational and personal factors affecting rural volunteering in Australia. This four-year project will conduct a national analysis of volunteering demand and supply, and generate new interdisciplinary knowledge of the structural, demographic, organisational and personal factors affecting the sustainability of rural volunteering. Expected outcomes of this project include a world-first index of volunteering vulnerabilities and a spatial map of volunteering unevenness, leading to the development of an evidence-based National Rural Volunteering Roadmap, which will guide the project’s volunteering peak body partners, governments and rural communities to plan for and support rural volunteering over the longer-term.
ARC grant number LP200301043
The project team
Professor Leonie Lockstone-Binney
Event and tourism volunteering, volunteering legacies, event studies, event management education and commemorative events.
Professor Amanda Davies
Demography, population geography and rural and regional development.
Professor Kirsten Holmes
Volunteering, particularly in events, leisure, sport and tourism contexts.
Professor Melanie Oppenheimer
The role of voluntary organisations and voluntary action in times of war and peace, the history of volunteering, gender and humanitarianism.
Research assistants
Dr Annette Maher
Dr Ingo Janowski
Previous outputs leading up to the project
- Alony, I., Haski-Leventhal, D., Lockstone-Binney, L., Holmes, K., & Meijs, L. C. P. M. (2020).Online volunteering at DigiVol: an innovative crowd-sourcing approach for heritage tourism artefacts preservation. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 15, 14-26.
- Davies, A., Holmes, K., & Lockstone-Binney, L.(2021, 26 April). Loss of two-thirds of volunteers delivers another COVID blow to communities. The Conversation.
- Davies, A., Lockstone-Binney, L., & Holmes, K. (2021). Recognising the value of volunteers in performing and supporting leadership in rural communities. Journal of Rural Studies, 86, 136-144.
- Davies, A., Holmes, K., Lockstone-Binney, L. (2018, 15 May). Why rural Australia is facing a volunteer crisis. The Conversation.
- Davies, A., Lockstone-Binney, L., & Holmes, K. (2018). Who are the future volunteers in rural places? Understanding the demographic and background characteristics of non-retired rural volunteers, why they volunteer and their future migration intentions. Journal of Rural Studies, 60, 167-175.
- Haski-Leventhal, D., Oppenheimer, M., Holmes, K., Lockstone-Binney, L., Alony, I., & Ong, F. (2018). Conceptualisation of volunteering among non-volunteers: Expanding definitions and dimensions using net-cost. Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 48(2), 30S–51S.
- Haski-Leventhal, D., Meijs, L., Lockstone-Binney, L., Holmes, K., & Oppenheimer, M. (2018). Measuring volunteerability and the capacity to volunteer among non-volunteers: Implications for social policy. Social Policy & Administration, 52(5), 1139-1167.
- Holmes, K., Davies, A., & Lockstone-Binney, L. (2019). The social and economic sustainability of WA’s rural volunteer workforce. Final report prepared for Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, Curtin University.
- Lockstone-Binney, L., Holmes, K., Meijs, L., Oppenheimer, M., Haski-Leventhal, D., & Taplin, R. (2021). Growing the volunteer pool: Identifying non-volunteers most likely to volunteer. Voluntas, 33, 777-794.
For more information on our previous Linkage project Creating and Sustaining a Strong Future for Volunteering in Australia – (LP: 140100528) please visit this website.
For more project information