Reimagining Volunteering: Decoding the skill-based volunteering

Picture this: a room filled with leaders from NGOs, each carrying years of experience running schools, shelters, and community programmes. They’ve come not to recruit volunteers, but to rethink what volunteering could mean for their organisations.

Over the past few weeks, iVolunteer organised a series of workshops in Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi to host workshops for NGOs on how to engage volunteers more strategically. These weren’t typical training sessions. They were open, lively conversations about what NGOs actually need and how volunteer support can move beyond “helping hands” into real organisational growth.

In Bengaluru, participants mapped more than 40 ideas for volunteer engagement, from digital training for teachers to career-guidance sessions for students. In Chennai, a deep dive into the iVolunteer skill-based volunteering project helped NGOs see how areas like HR, communications and data management could benefit just as much as their frontline programmes.

Across cities, the same themes emerged:

• NGOs want clearer ways to match volunteer skills with their real needs.

• They see that retention depends on well-scoped projects and clear expectations.

• And they’re eager for structured processes to make volunteering meaningful for both sides.

The workshops also showed a lot of optimism. Many participants admitted they had only ever thought of volunteers in traditional roles. Seeing how other NGOs were experimenting with skill-based volunteering from IT support to marketing to curriculum design opened up new possibilities.

For iVolunteer, these sessions confirmed a simple but powerful shift: volunteering is no longer an afterthought. It’s becoming a core strategy for NGOs to build capacity, strengthen systems and extend their impact.

As we wrap up this series of workshops, we’re excited to continue working alongside NGOs to make volunteering more effective, more credible and more transformative for organisations, for volunteers and for the communities they serve.