When the largest ($73 million) and most visible volunteerism organization in the United States releases a major report—titled From Nice to Necessary: Unleashing the Impact of Volunteering Through Transformative Investment—it deserves to be read and even pondered. As I’ve argued throughout my column, volunteers are not a frill or a nicety. They are an essential part of the nonprofit workforce and nurture important community connections, cohesion, and change, demonstrating the importance of investing in volunteers.

Unfortunately, the report from the Points of Light Foundation states that until now volunteerism has been seen as “nice” but not essential. (Although Points of Light initially responded to our request for an interview, we were ultimately unable to arrange one.)

Such a claim dismisses and marginalizes the people who have volunteered in hospitals, in disasters, in civil rights organizations, in support groups, in mentoring, in immigrant-aid efforts, with disabled children and adults, in soup kitchens and food banks, with rescued dogs and cats, in scientific research, and in igniting and leading movements. In such areas, both staff and volunteers have known for decades that that work is both central and crucial.

So, the “from nice” part of this report deserves to be rebuked. But the “necessary” framing in the report is to be applauded, although we are somewhat startled that it is only in 2025 that Points of Light appears to have come to this conclusion. It’s noteworthy that the report also states that volunteerism is central to social change, although they don’t call out specifics such as igniting social movements like Black Lives Matter.

New Data From the Report on Investing in Volunteers

Points of Light indicated in the report that of every $100 that foundations give, only 19¢ goes to volunteer engagement. What this means is that while foundations often fund direct services, they do not fund support to the volunteer workforce that brings direct services to scale, nor do they fund the volunteerism infrastructure.

Perhaps one reason for this is that foundations are often unaware of volunteers: They rarely ask about volunteers in their lengthy application forms; there are seldom breakouts or keynotes on volunteerism at conferences; and foundation periodicals and blogs appear to be completely blind to the economic and social contributions of volunteers.

Read the full article about investing in volunteerism by Jan Masaoka at Nonprofit Quarterly.