Ms Patricia Nolan:

As Ms McKenna stated, I am the manager of the South Dublin County Volunteer Centre.
In times of ever-dwindling resources, in some ways it is incumbent on us to deliver a bang for our buck, particularly as we are in organisations in receipt of public funds. Ms McKenna spoke about the funding issues that affect us as a network but one aspect I want to speak about is our value for money as a network. I will highlight some of the outputs that we measure as a network of 21 volunteer centres and Volunteer Ireland, and then Mr. Cotterell will speak about some of the impacts, which we can see and which are not as easy to measure.
Over the past years one of our main achievements as a national network has been to build from the ground up a national database for volunteering which we called I-VOL. We have done this at little or no cost to the Exchequer. It is a database donated to us by a company called Salesforce and it is worth in excess of €150,000 in in-kind funding.
We built I-VOL as a searchable database for volunteering. It allows potential volunteers to view opportunities to volunteer around them, right down to their local town. It can be accessed on the website, volunteer.ie, or one can look at it on any volunteer centre website. If one has time, one can download our smartphone application, app, for volunteering, called I-VOL, which was developed by a volunteer from the Institute of Technology Tallaght.
As well as allowing potential volunteers to view opportunities and to register with their local centre, I-VOL allows organisations to register online and register their volunteering opportunities. It provides the match between volunteers and organisations. Crucially, it also allows us to track trends and statistics in volunteering. I thought I might present some of the startling statistics from 2013 that we have measured.
In 2013, some 14,953 new volunteers registered on I-VOL for the first time, either through I-VOL or through their local volunteer centre. These were all new volunteers who were registering for the first time. A further 2,500 volunteers from previous years re-engaged with centres and came back looking for more support and new opportunities to volunteer. Therefore, 17,500 volunteers in total were supported across the network of centres. Over 6,500 volunteer roles were filled. These are volunteer roles that we know of, those who have come back to us stating that they have started volunteering in an organisation doing a piece of work. We do not hear back from many of the volunteers who we refer on to organisations and start, I suppose, because our job is done.
One aspect we are able to measure with volunteers who have started is the amount of hours they commit to volunteering. In 2013, we recorded over 500,000 volunteer hours. These are not cumulative hours. These are hours that are recorded by volunteers who registered in 2013 and started volunteering in 2013, and we are not counting the volunteers who started volunteering in 2012, 2011, etc. It is the international standard to measure a volunteer by the average industrial wage, and if one multiplies those 500,000 hours by the average industrial wage, the result is the equivalent of over €11 million in return on investment. One should note that the budget for the infrastructure to support 21 centres and Volunteer Ireland is €2 million and yet we are giving back in one fell swoop over €11 million worth of volunteering hours. This is the equivalent of 300 full-time workers who we would have to put in place to replace the volunteers who have begun volunteering.
Startlingly, 71% of volunteers registered with us are under 35 years of age and 62% who have come to us have never volunteered previously. Another point to note is that organisations are supported by us and are registered on our database. In 2013, over 900 new organisations registered for volunteers bringing the total amount of volunteer organisations that we support across Ireland to 7,000.
If one were to go onto I-VOL today, one would see over 3,000 active volunteer opportunities for potential volunteers to browse through. These are national statistics and we can break these down into local statistics. If a member would like to find local statistics about volunteering trends in their county, we would be happy to provide them. I would highlight that this is only a taste of what we measure and it does not show the other work that we do.
We also provide training and supports to not-for-profit organisations on volunteer management and good practice.

Sometimes we might say it is not always as difficult to get volunteers as it is to retain them in organisations. Therefore, much of the work we do at local level is to help organisations to develop their capacity to retain volunteers once they have started. We work with corporates also to support them in volunteering as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes. Volunteer Ireland runs a series of inspiration days to support corporates to volunteer.

Local volunteer centres have taken on the role of providing a Garda vetting service to local and small not-for-profits that cannot gain access to Garda vetting themselves. Recently, we have been approached by the Department of Social Protection and now we are providing vetting for all the CE programmes nationally, in addition to providing vetting for small local organisations. In excess of 500 organisations are accessing Garda vetting through their local volunteer centre.

We also run promotional events and campaigns on volunteering, including National Volunteering Week, local outreach programmes and the Ireland Involved awards. We have developed and implement quality standards, not only for volunteer centres but also in respect of organisations that involve volunteers.

It can be clearly seen that from the relatively small amount of money invested in the volunteering infrastructure, we provide a great return. I will hand over to Mr. Cotterell, who will talk about the phenomena that are not easily measured, the impacts.