There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether parents still volunteer. A recent Mamamia article asked exactly that question, and it clearly struck a nerve.

If you’re involved in a P&C, it’s easy to see why. You put out a call for helpers and hear crickets. The canteen roster has the same names on it every week. You need six people for Saturday and somehow end up with three, two of whom are already on the committee. Meanwhile, there is usually one person who knows the raffle login, has the key to the storage shed, is ordering the sausages, answering the Facebook messages and trying to remember whether anyone actually booked the jumping castle.

So yes, something has changed. But we’re not convinced the problem is that parents don’t care or don’t want to contribute anymore. Maybe the way we ask people to volunteer simply hasn’t caught up with the way families actually live.

The old model is getting harder to sustain

For a long time, school and community organisations have relied on a fairly simple model: a relatively small group of people gives a relatively large amount of time. The same people join the committee, run the stalls, organise the events, collect the prizes, fill the rosters and come back again next year to do it all over again.

Family life has changed, though. More households have both parents working, people are juggling jobs, kids, sport, appointments and caring responsibilities, and cost-of-living pressures mean taking time away from paid work isn’t always an option. Women also continue to carry a disproportionate amount of the unpaid and invisible work that keeps families and plenty of school communities running.

Against that backdrop, asking someone to give up six hours on a Saturday to help with a fundraiser is a pretty big ask. But “I can’t give you my whole Saturday” is not the same as “I don’t care about my school”, and that distinction is important.

Perhaps instead of asking why people won’t volunteer, we need to get better at asking what would make it easier for them to say yes.

Make the ask smaller and clearer

There is a big difference between asking, “Can anyone help with the fete?” and asking, “Can someone pick up ten bags of ice at 8am and drop them at the school?”

One sounds suspiciously like you might accidentally become responsible for an entire event. The other is a job. You know what you’re being asked to do, how long it will take and, importantly, when you are finished.

That might be a much better model for modern volunteering: smaller asks, clearly defined jobs and more ways for people to contribute without having to make a huge ongoing commitment.

Someone might not want to join the P&C, but they’ll happily sell raffle tickets for an hour. Someone else might never make a meeting but can design a poster from their couch after the kids are in bed. Another parent might not have much spare time at all, but they know the local business owner who could donate a prize, the electrician who can help with an event or someone with a trailer you can borrow.

All of those people are contributing, and we probably need to get better at recognising that as volunteering too.

Fundraising needs the same rethink

The same logic applies to fundraising. Some fundraisers make a lot of money, but they also require 25 volunteers, four months of planning, hundreds of emails, multiple spreadsheets and one person quietly questioning every life decision that led to them being responsible for the chocolate wheel.

We tend to judge fundraisers by the final figure: We made $10,000! What we don’t always calculate is how much volunteer time went into making that $10,000.

Maybe we should.

If one fundraiser makes $10,000 but consumes hundreds of volunteer hours and leaves your committee completely cooked, is it actually better than a few simpler fundraisers that make slightly less but require a fraction of the work?

There’s obviously no magic formula because every school and community is different. But volunteer time is a resource just like money is, and we should probably start treating it that way. Sometimes the best fundraiser isn’t the one that makes the most money; it’s the one your P&C actually has the capacity to run well.

We should also be using better tools

There are plenty of P&C jobs that no human being needs to be doing manually in 2026. Chasing payments, copying names between spreadsheets, sending individual reminders, counting paper raffle tickets, recreating the same volunteer roster every year or writing the same sponsor letter from scratch for the fifteenth time are not particularly good uses of anyone’s limited volunteer hours.

If a decent system, template or bit of technology can take some of that work away, we should use it. That doesn’t make volunteering less personal or less community-minded. It frees people up to spend their time on the parts that actually need humans: building relationships, talking to local businesses, helping kids, creating events and making the school community a nicer place to be.

Technology shouldn’t replace volunteers. It should stop us wasting them on unnecessary admin.

Not everyone has to be a super-volunteer

We also think there’s something worth challenging in the idea that commitment is measured by hours.

Most P&Cs have those incredible people who give enormous amounts of their time, and schools would struggle without them. But they shouldn’t become the standard everyone else feels they have to meet.

The parent who gives you 45 minutes is still helping. The person who volunteers once a year is still a volunteer. The dad who will never attend a committee meeting but is happy to tow something, build something or sell raffle tickets on Saturday night is still part of your volunteer community.

If the only options we offer people are join the committee or give us half your weekend, we’re probably missing a very large group of parents who would happily contribute in other ways.

Give people a small way in, make it easy to understand what you need, and make helping a good experience. They might even come back.

This is the bit we’re interested in

At No More Sausages, we don’t think the answer to volunteer shortages is another lecture about how everyone needs to “do their bit”. Most parents are already doing plenty of bits.

We’re much more interested in redesigning the work around the people we actually have. Can we make the fundraiser simpler? Can one enormous job become ten small ones? Can we create a template so next year’s committee doesn’t have to start from scratch? Can technology remove three hours of admin? Can a local business or community partner take on some of the heavy lifting? Can we raise decent money without requiring half the school community to sacrifice a weekend?

Most importantly, can we make helping your school feel achievable rather than overwhelming?

Because we don’t think volunteering is dying. Parents still care about their kids’ schools. They still want better playgrounds, libraries, sports equipment, arts programs and opportunities. They still want to know other families and feel connected to the community around them.

What’s changing is how much time people have and how they’re able to give it. P&Cs need to change with them.

The future of volunteering probably isn’t finding more people willing to make the P&C their second unpaid job. It’s finding ways for a lot more people to do a little bit of good.

And when you get enough people doing a little bit, it can add up to a lot.

Less grind, more good.