Volunteering
Many organisations in the sector involve volunteers or indeed are volunteer-led.
2020-2025
Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and Volunteer Scotland among others launched the Make Your Mark initiative in 2020. The initiative aims to unite the heritage sector, with a focus on supporting and increasing volunteering amongst underrepresented groups. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative also aims to support organisations as they recover and renew their volunteering programmes.
In 2022-2023 the initiative collaborated with the University of Strathclyde to create an inclusive volunteering toolkit as a part of Scotland’s Volunteering Action Plan. Read more here. The second version was updated in 2025.
2016-2019
In Spring 2016 Historic Environment Scotland commissioned research to update statistics on the amount and impact of volunteering in Scotland’s historic environment sector. BEFS helped shape the research and supported dissemination of the survey via its members.
The research was carried out by Volunteer Scotland. Key findings indicated that 17,100 people gave their time for free during 2015 and that 46% of organisations surveyed would not exist were it not for volunteers. The same number of volunteers were contributing to the historic environment in 2018 (SHEA 2018). The research commissioned by HES identified around 1000 organisations active in the sector. However, authors recognised that there may well be double this number.
The full report is available here:
Volunteering and the Historic Environment
Executive summary of the report
Further details on the case studies used are available here: