199 - The Future of Volunteerism - Trends & Predictions Part 2

January 29, 2026

Episode #199: The Future of Volunteerism – Trends & Predictions Part 2

In this episode of The Volunteer Nation Podcast, Tobi Johnson continues her deep dive into the future of volunteerism with Part 2 of her trends and predictions series. 

Building on the first three trends covered in Episode 198, Tobi explores how wellness, technology, data, and evolving models of giving are reshaping how volunteers engage and what leaders need to prepare for next. 

Inspired by futurist Faith Popcorn’s question, “If you knew everything about tomorrow, what would you do differently today?”, this episode is both a practical roadmap and a strategic thought experiment for volunteer leaders who want to stay ahead of the curve. 

Volunteering Trends – Episode Highlights 

  • [00:59] – Volunteering Trends and Predictions: Part 1 Recap 
  • [04:41] – Trend #4: Volunteerism as a Prescription for Wellness 
  • [09:14] – Trend #5: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Volunteerism 
  • [16:33] – Trend #6: Touchscreen Volunteering 
  • [20:31] – Trend #7: Blurring the Lines Between Philanthropy and Giving 
  • [25:33] – Trend #8: Better Data and Analysis 
  • [28:21] – Recap and Final Thoughts 

Volunteering Trends – Quotes from the Episode 

“The bottom line really is that volunteerism is evolving from a nice to do to a good for you, and it’s increasingly viewed as a preventative and restorative practice that supports mental health, social connection, and whole person wellness while still delivering meaningful community impact.”

“If we can automate the admin side and focus more on the person-to-person side, I think our field would be better off for it.”

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About the Show

Nonprofit leadership author, trainer, consultant, and volunteer management expert Tobi Johnson shares weekly tips to help charities build, grow, and scale exceptional volunteer teams. Discover how your nonprofit can effectively coordinate volunteers who are reliable, equipped, and ready to help you bring about BIG change for the better.

If you’re ready to ditch the stress and harness the power of people to fuel your good work, you’re in exactly the right place!

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Episode #199 Transcript: The Future of Volunteerism – Trends & Predictions Part 2

Tobi: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and in today’s episode number 199, if you can believe it. Next episode will be 200 episodes of this podcast. It’s really hard to believe. I can’t even remember recording that many, but if you’ve been a long time listener, I just wanna thank you so much for listening for all of these episodes.

I think this is about almost three and a half years of podcasting. It’s kind of crazy. But today I wanna talk about volunteering trends and the future of volunteerism. I am talking about my trends and predictions, and working in this episode through my Final Five, in part one of the future of volunteerism trends and predictions.

I talked about the future of volunteerism trend number one, the public call for increased accountability and nonprofits, and what that means for volunteer organizations and how we engage volunteers. The second trend I talked about was the future volunteerism. Trend number two, resurgence of mutual aid volunteerism, and I talked about the need in the world for helping community members do more together.

We just simply don’t have the kind of safety nets we need for all of the things that are coming our way, whether it be natural disasters, whether it be newcomer and immigrant support, whether it be advocating as professionals. There’s still so much need for people in communities to come together that I just feel like we’re gonna have a, a resurgence of mutual aid volunteerism, or what I like to call mutual aid volunteerism, which is sort of this hybrid between.

Informal helping of friends and neighbors and more formal. Volunteering with organizations, there’s a middle way that I like to call mutual aid volunteerism, the future of volunteerism. Trend number three I talked about in the last episode 1 98 were were the psychological advances in community and belonging are understanding of human behavior has begun to be more sophisticated, certainly.

About a decade ago when I wrote chapter one of Volunteer Engagement 2.0, I wrote about big shifts that would change volunteerism for the better. I talked about this in our last episode and I really talked about neuroscience and NeuroLeadership and the understandings that science was starting to build around.

We as individuals, so what motivates us to lead, what motivates us to take action, et cetera. MRI scans and all of our brain science, our ability to watch the brain in action led to this massive influx of research about human behavior. And sort of 2.0 to that is really now that we understand individual motivation, how can we understand how to best work in groups, which I think is the next frontier.

And in the last. Episode I talked a lot about some of the research. I mentioned some of the research that’s been out there, the things that people are studying around human behavior in groups, and so that’s the next big thing we need to understand as leaders of volunteers. So in this episode, part two, I wanna talk about my predictions and volunteering trends based on the world around US technology, what I’m seeing, and what we might expect and what we need to prepare for.

As I mentioned in part one. We’re kind of inspired by Faith Popcorn, the futurist who’s, who asks on her website, if you knew everything about tomorrow, what would you do differently today? So I always like to think about the future and how we can start to prepare for it better. So let’s get into the future of volunteerism trend number four, which is volunteerism as a prescription for wellness.

Now, this is not a brand new thing, but volunteerism is increasingly being recognized as a. Powerful nonclinical tool to support individual and community wellness. Health systems. Public health agencies and nonprofits are reframing, volunteering not just as a service to the community, but a also as a protective factor for mental, emotional and social health.

It was interesting last night, I’m in New Zealand. In the Southern Alps and doing a bit of traveling in the south island before I do a workshop up in Wilmington next week. And on the television last night was a commercial around mental wellness and it was called topping Up. Well, the theme was topping up.

So what are the ways to top up your brain health so that you are more resilient as a human being? It was a really interesting public service announcement and you know, volunteering is one of those ways of topping up your brain so that you can be more resilient in the world. So at the individual level, volunteering is linked to reduced loneliness, lower stressed, improved moods, stronger sense of purpose, as well as key, you know, lower stress levels.

It’s linked to cardiovascular health. There’s lots of research out there, but. It’s also helping being positioned as a meaningful way to rebuild connection and resilience. Sort of like topping off off, as I just mentioned, in healthcare and public health, volunteerism is starting to show up through social prescribing models where clinicians are recommending community engagement, including volunteering as part of care plans, which I think is fantastic, right?

These approaches are recognizing that health shaped. Not only by medical treatment, but by relationships, belonging, and purpose. And I remember years ago writing a blog post about, Hey, why aren’t we doing volunteer wellness plans for our volunteers? And so. You know, vol, there are workplace wellness programs that might include volunteerism, but why not Also volunteer wellness programs within our organizations, even a couple things a year to help our volunteers be well, but also to help the community know that volunteerism is a wellness activity as well.

You know, the bottom line really is that volunteerism is evolving from a nice to do to a good for you, and it’s increasingly viewed as a preventative and restorative practice that supports mental health, social connection, and whole person wellness while still delivering meaningful community impact. And so I think that.

One of the trends we’re gonna start to see is more organizations leaning into this messaging and actually designing around how to promote volunteer wellness and how to promote community wellness through volunteering. You know, there still needs to be more research, you know, to be truly beneficial. What kind of volunteering, how much volunteering, et cetera.

We also. Can tap AI to better understand this. So emerging artificial intelligence research like using reinforcement learning and graph models is advancing our understanding of how to optimally form and support collaborative groups with potential applications for team building, group performance design, as well as wellness.

And so it’s gonna be interesting to see if the data. Around volunteerism and wellness can be more deeply explored through ai. So there’s sort of this combination of wellness and ai so that those areas I think need more research. We already have proof, a lot of documented research around the, the connections between volunteering and wellbeing in volunteers and in communities.

But what are the prescriptions, how much, et cetera? So that’s my volunteering trend. Number four. Let’s talk about my volunteering trends, future volunteerism, trend number five, artificial intelligence. Now, I just mentioned that a little bit, but hey, this is not about our robot overlords. It’s not about taking.

Over our people focused aspects of our work. It’s about creating more space for that community building side of our work and removing a lot of the administrative and paperwork side of things that make it so challenging for leaders of volunteers to get away from their desks and get out and start talking to people who are volunteering.

That is where we should. Be. That’s where the best of our time is spent. Additionally, on the volunteer side, just removing any barriers and challenges for volunteers to have a fluid experience. There’s so many ways that we can use. AI and AI agents that we can set up to help match volunteers with opportunities to motivate them at every step of their journey based on a personalized approach to help them find resources and next steps to find new roles to evolve into, to offer them training recommendations, to provide any kind of Justin time support as well as a searchable way.

To find information that’s easy and tailored inside the Volunteer Pro Impact Lab. We have an AI widget that crawls all of my podcast as well as all of my internal training content within the community. And it can help you write, volunteer, thank you emails. It can help you figure out how to use social media.

It can help you do. Lots of things by just an AI query, and it only looks at my content within the community, so people can really trust that this is good information, actionable information, and proven information that they can take forward. But there are ways to use that AI to add. What are called AI agents, which go out and automate and find information, and you can set up to send specific emails at specific times, specific prompts.

And so we’re gonna be looking into this in the coming year of how we can even make our community, our Impact lab community experience even more valuable to our members in terms of saving time, in terms of getting the bright information. For their goals, our members’ goals. So it’s really interesting to see what AI could do.

You know, it can also help volunteer driven organizations analyze trends and patterns in volunteerism as well as to better track and explain impact to funders and investors. So this volunteerism trend of artificial intelligence or ai, I think is going to help us not only communicate better and create better volunteer experiences if we approach it.

Through the route of using AI agents, more automation, more personalization, but also to help us understand how volunteerism is working in our organizations. What’s working, what’s not working, what we’re learning about impact, what we’re learning about systems and processes and flows and human behavior, and just what’s, you know, really working for our volunteers and the communities they’re serving.

And so I think. Obviously AI is a big deal in the world today, so I couldn’t not include it on our list of volunteerism trends, but I really think that it’s something that we can’t ignore, but that we can also approach in an ethical and thoughtful way, and if we use it. With the right focus in mind, I think we can improve things for everybody so that we can spend more time doing the people side of the work.

If we can automate the admin side and focus more on the person to person side, I think our field would be better off for it. And so that’s my trend number five. So let’s pause for a quick break from my volunteering trends for 2026. Don’t go anywhere. When we get back, I’ll share three more trends that I think might interest you.

So don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back. Hey, are you looking to upgrade and modernize your volunteer program? Or maybe you’re building one from scratch and you’re just not sure where to start? If so, we’ve got the perfect resource for you. The Volunteer Pro Impact Lab, having built several direct service programs from the ground up, I know that it doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s a clear process that takes careful attention with a focus on impact. In the end, you need a system in place. That’s clear, standardized, efficient, and that gets results. In addition, and maybe this is the most important, you need a volunteer program design that directly contributes to your organization’s most critical goals.

That’s where the Volunteer Pro Impact Lab comes in. When it comes to effective volunteer engagement, our bespoke volunteer strategy success path model, which is the heart of our resources and strategic advising, will help you transform your volunteer strategy from fundamental to a fully mature what’s working now approach and all in less time.

With our online assessment, you’ll quickly gain clarity on precisely where to focus your efforts and we’ll provide recommendations for the exact steps needed. For sustainable growth, regardless of how large or small your organization is or what your cause impact area or focus is. Our program development and implementation support model will help you build a strong foundation so volunteerism can thrive at your good cause.

If you’re interested in learning more, go to ball pro.net. Slash join and we’ll share how to get started and what’s involved. Again, that’s fall pro.net/join. Okay, we’re back from my part two of our conversation of the future of volunteerism trends and predictions. I shared two trends before the break.

One was on volunteerism as a prescription for wellness, and we talked about how we might lean into that a little bit more into the area of wellness and promoting volunteerism is something that can help people thrive, but also. We talked about volunteerism trend number five, which is around artificial intelligence, how we might use it to improve the volunteer experience and help us better understand the dynamics of volunteerism within our organization.

What are the impacts? What are the flows and things that are working, and what are things that aren’t? So I think AI can help us with that as well. My next trend that for the future volunteerism trend number six is about touchscreen volunteering. And what I mean by touchscreen volunteering is just figuring out how to use the mechanics of our digital tools to increase.

Our volunteer experience, the, improve the value of it, improve the flow of it, but also to gather data. So there’s an example sometimes I share in training around the Atlanta airport in outside of the bathrooms, the restrooms. When you leave the restrooms at the Atlanta airport, there’s just a simple touch screen that has a happy face, a neutral face, and a frowny face.

And we, they just ask you to share how, well, how clean is the bathroom? How good is your experience? Because our experience at bathrooms, it’s either about, are we waiting in line or are we experiencing a clean or unclean bathroom? Those are the things that we really assess restrooms on or that we can find it in the first place.

Right. So, but through this, just in time data could be collected. I don’t know if it’s being collected. It could be that they’re just trying to track whether or not the bathrooms are being kept L clean, but it could be. Collected to provide just in time information for recommended action. So if AI were combined with that data collection, it could be that an alert goes up and says, Hey, we’ve gotten X number of frowny faces.

It’s time to go clean that bathroom. So it’d be very interesting to see how something like this might be used for volunteer opportunities, particularly in big event volunteering where it’s hard to keep eyes on the ground of every volunteer team and what’s going on. And so it might be interesting even on, not necessarily on.

Kiosks with touchscreens, but even using volunteers’ own mobile devices, are there ways to check in with people and have people just touch the screen? How much fun are you having today? How much of a difference are you making today? And there, what I mean by touchscreen volunteering is to record data in the moment that you can quickly respond to.

So at the point of service, just in time. If there’s a problem in a certain area, you start seeing that trend, AI pops up a a note. The person involved with supporting those volunteers can show up in person. So it’s a way, it’s a very interesting way to think of colle collecting data and also responding to it quickly.

There’s also a way to perhaps connect this to what I was talking about earlier. Which was mutual aid volunteerism. I talked about that trend a lot in part one of this series. But is there a way to provide instant connection to community needs via our mobile devices? How can we gather information about community needs and respond quickly to them?

So maybe it’s natural disaster, maybe it’s something else. So. That’s my future of volunteerism because the technology is already here. And the analytical side, the AI not only touch screens are already here and mobile devices are, have long been here and people have long been tapping information to their mobile devices that now we have ai so we can make this touch touchscreen data collection even more responsive.

So I think it’s just really interesting to think about how. Just in time information is used in the deployment of volunteers. So just an interesting thing, it’s a trend. I think that we may see more and more data being used just in time with our volunteers. So future of volunteerism. Trend number seven is about blurring the lines between types of philanthropy and giving.

Now, I’ve always encouraged this because as we know, volunteers are donors, and donors are volunteers. They actually don’t see themselves as two different groups of people. But there are things collective ways that people have been giving in recent years. One is giving circles. So a group of individuals who pool their charitable contributions learn together and collectively decide how to distribute funds to nonprofit causes they care about.

We had, I did an interview a few years ago with Sarah Lo Loma Lean about giving circles, and I will post a link to that episode. So if you’re interested in learning more about what’s behind giving circles, how are they being implemented, what are the goals? Et cetera. You might be interested. The other area of collective giving, or at least purposeful large scale giving is through donor-advised funds.

So a donor-advised fund is a charitable investment account, but it’s typically managed by a financial institution or a community foundation that allows an individual or a family. To make tax deductible contributions and recommend grants to nonprofits over time. So it’s almost that a donor-advised fund becomes a mini fund foundation, like a small family foundation, but it’s not set up as a foundation.

So it’s interesting to think about how both giving circles and donor advice funds might be more integrated with volunteerism. You know, both of these. Types of giving are, and philanthropy are structured ways to organize giving. So they’re structured, they’re thoughtful, they’re ahead of time. It’s not just, you know, what am I gonna give at my end of year gift to my favorite nonprofit?

Both allow donors to be intentional and strategic about their philanthropy, and both can support long-term giving and community impact giving. Circles emphasize community shared learning and collective impact. Donor-advised funds emphasize flexibility, tax efficiency, and individual control, but in both ways.

They are thoughtful, predetermined ways that people who are in deeply into philanthropy and supporting nonprofits and communities are being very purposeful in their giving. So the bottom line is how can we, you know, kind of integrate volunteerism into these types of activities? So it’s not just about the financial contributions.

It’s many donors and volunteers, especially if you think about giving circles, they’re craving community. They’re craving getting together. They’re craving being in a group that has, that is making meaning in the world. So it’s interesting to think about how volunteerism and the contributions of time and talent might be incorporated into what we see as philanthropy.

Thus blurring the lines between the types of giving and potentially boosting its power. That is the most important, I think, thing I think is about boosting its power. How much more can folks that are involved in donor-advised funds or managing donor-advised funds and. Folks involved in giving circles.

How much more informed can they be about their philanthropy when they are involved with volunteerism? And how can they, within their own networks, encourage volunteerism, whether it’s within their places of employment, their educational institutions, et cetera. They are usually folks involved in giving circles haves.

They are people and donor-advised funds are people. They may not be high net worth per se, especially in giving circles, but they are people of means and they have networks. Uh, and they have social capital, and this is something that in addition to the power of the purse, that they could also think about how they can contribute the power of community and the power of our collective expertise.

And so for me, I always think, you know, when we separate out financial giving and giving of time and talent, we are doing both a disservice that both could be more powerful when they are combined. So that’s my trend number seven, is how can we blur the lines between types of philanthropy and giving? As you probably could see, my trends are not only trends, they’re my wishlist for what we might see, but I’m also seeing these things happen in real life.

So my final future of volunteerism, trend number eight. Is better data and analysis. We’ve talked a little bit about this, about ai, but you know, there’s questions we have. What actually drives volunteers impact what management interventions, what facilitation, what resources, what supports, what is the economic impact beyond wage replacement?

What modeling makes the most sense and is the most accurate? Big questions that folks are really working hard on right now. How do we track civic impact beyond voting and participation in groups or helping friends and neighbors? What actual change and transformation are occurring at the community level because of volunteer involvement and then there’s a human impact?

How is volunteerism transforming us as a society? And even as. Species as the human race, how is volunteerism evolving, changing? Or impacting who we are as a species. I think that is a very, it’s volunteering is a pro-social behavior. It is required for a species to have pro-social behavior for it to last as long as we have, and human beings have been on this planet for a long time.

And the reason, part of the reason anyway. Is that we work and collaborate in groups. That is a large part of why our species has survived this long. And so obviously key to our survival. I know this is getting really deep, but it’s true. The key to one of the keys to our survival is the ability to continue to collaborate, to continue to be parts of clans that work together for the common good.

And so when we think about this. This is a trend when we understand volunteerism on all of these different levels as a human impact, a societal impact, as economic impact, as civic impact. When we understand these different areas of impact, I think often we’re trying to just pick, figure out impact for our funders or impact for investment into volunteering.

But there are. Bigger questions out there around the impact of volunteering and volunteerism. So this volunteering trend, I think is going to be, we’re gonna move ahead by leaps and bounds, partly because there’s some smart people working on these types of questions. There’s also. Better data analytics and better analysis and better tools, you know, through ai, as I mentioned before.

But we’re starting to have better ways to model and understand these data. And so those are my eight trends. And so I just wanna recap real quick, the future of volunteerism. Trend number one was the public call for increased accountability and what our nonprofits need to do to respond. To build in trust and volunteerism is part of that.

Community engagement is part of that trust building exercise, the future of volunteerism. Trend number two was resurgence of mutual aid volunteerism, so the community needs aren’t getting fewer. The areas, the safety net in our community and society at large. It’s still needed and not all nonprofits are able to keep up with all of the community needs that are out there.

So we will probably most likely start to see more mutual aid volunteerism happening, which is sort of between our formal volunteering and our informal, which is with organizations and our informal volunteering, which is where neighbors are helping neighbors. Mutual aid volunteering is somewhere in the middle.

Future of volunteerism. Trend number three is really about the psychological advances in community and belonging. So beyond the understanding of individual motivation, what is it about the dynamics of human behavior and how we work together? What are ways to make that more optimal and make that. Better and make that higher impact.

So an understanding how we work together in groups as human beings, I think is a very interesting area of study. And beyond basic, just NeuroLeadership and neuroscience. Or neuroscience based on individual thinking, future of volunteerism. Trend number four is about volunteerism as a prescription for wellness.

How can we lean into volunteerism in a way, and how can we communicate about its benefits and. Research even further its benefits in our organizations and even offer wellness programs to our volunteers. How is that prescription of wellness being integrated into what This is a very well established area of study, the impact of volunteering on people.

So how can we take that to the next level, that understanding future volunteerism? Trend number five is all about ai and how are we gonna tap ai, AI agents to automate and improve the administrative side, the paperwork side of volunteerism, so that we can spend more and more time on the people side, the face-to-face side, the community building side.

If we could free up. Folks time from the paperwork, even our volunteer application processes, how can they be radically improved through the use of ai? And then volunteer future volunteerism. Trend number six, touchscreen volunteering. How can we collect data for just in time? Response and support to our volunteers.

And also how can we share just in time information with communities about what’s needed right here and right now. So how can we really improve or. Really create faster response times for emerging community needs through touchscreen, volunteering, future volunteerism. Trend number seven, blurring the lines between types of philanthropy and giving.

I’ve always pointed to this as a need because they really aren’t in the world outside of our organizations volunteering and giving of. Giving of time and talent and giving financially are often happening by the same people. So how can we, and I gave examples of donor-advised funds, as well as giving circles of ways people do purposeful planning with an expectation of impact.

And so how can we help those folks get involved with volunteerism as well? And then the future of volunteerism. Trend number eight is just better data and analysis. We have so many more. Tools nowadays than we did in the past, and so it’s just gonna be easier for us to understand impact around civic impact, human impact, economic impact, societal impact.

What are the different ways that volunteering can do good in the world and is doing good in the world? So those are my top trends for 2026. This has been a fantastic thing to just think about in terms of a thought ex experiment. I’d love to hear your. Thoughts about the future of volunteerism? What do you think are the trends?

You can either tag us in social media, especially in LinkedIn. I’m gonna start a conversation on this when the episodes air, but also just post into comments of this podcast. What do you think are the trends? That for this year. What have I missed that I should have maybe included or that you think should be included?

And let’s start a conversation about what we need to do. What would we do differently based on what we know now about the future? And it’s an interesting. Thing to think about. It’s a way of being proactive as a leader, and it’s a way of really getting ahead of the curve in terms of volunteer engagement and our strategy rather than always being reactive.

That’s the purpose of thinking into the future. So I wanna thank you for joining us for this episode of The Volunteer Nation. I hope it’s giving you fresh insights, maybe some new ideas, maybe some different ways of thinking, and I hope it helps you. Attract the kinds of enthusiastic support you need in your community.

If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague or someone who might just need some inspiration or new ways of thinking or a better approach that gets some traction. So I hope to see you next time. I will be here next week. Same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. Take care, everybody.