Is there a geography of volunteering in Wales?

In Wales as elsewhere, the role of volunteers has been brought to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic as people offered their services to help address the needs of vulnerable groups within their communities. Concerns surrounding the sustainability of such volunteering efforts have drawn attention to the types of infrastructure that could help facilitate and retain volunteering activities in a post-COVID Wales to ensure any gaps in provision are addressed. In a recently published paper, using two cohorts of the National Survey for Wales, we have investigated whether a proxy measure of local volunteering opportunities could be used to capture those geographical factors that may interact with these types of characteristics to impact on the propensity to ‘formally’ volunteer.