About Event Volunteering
"Many festivals and events depend upon volunteers to make them possible. Volunteers put the community into community events."
Steven Wood Schmader, CEO of the International Festivals & Events Association
New South Wales has hosted some of the biggest and most successful events in Australia. Part of the secret of the success of these events has been the dedicated volunteers who've helped make them happen.
What does being an event volunteer involve?
Many of the biggest and most successful events depend upon event volunteers, as do numerous awareness-raising and fundraising activities conducted by non-profit groups. These include Red Nose Day, Daffodil Day or the Red Shield Appeal. Event volunteers also get involved with public events like festivals, forums, seminars, street fairs, tickertape parades, and all sorts of sporting, cultural and art events.To make sure these events run smoothly, event volunteers are usually recruited by not-for-profits, councils or government bodies and event organisers to undertake a wide variety of roles. Volunteer roles in events include the following:
- Spectator services
- Marshalling
- Drink station attendants
- Logistics
- Pre-event office assistance
- Registration
- And many more.
Any one who volunteers or wants to volunteer can be an event volunteer if they have interest, a useful skill and the time.
We only refer our event volunteers to events supporting local government, community groups and not-for-profits to ensure volunteers are not exploited or involved inappropriately in raising money for the private sector.
Events we've supported
The Centre for Volunteering has made its mark and referred on potential volunteers to a wide range of events in Sydney including:- The Royal Easter Show
- Daffodil Day
- Red Nose Day
- Masters Swimming events at Homebush and Blacktown Swimming Pools
- St George / BRW corporate triathlon at Mrs Macquarie's Point
- City to Surf
- Surry Hills Festival
- Haldon Street Festival
- CERES Festival
- Wesley Mission's Spirit of Mission dinner
- The Sydney Swans Community Games at Telstra Stadium
- Museums Light Up Sydney!
- The Bali tribute ceremony – collecting money for The Red Cross at the Domain
- City of Sydney NYE
- NSW Premier's Forum on Spinal Chord Injury and Conditions, Keynote speaker Christopher Reeve (January 2003)
- The Flora Sydney Marathon
- Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games
Find out how our volunteers benefited these events by reading about our past events.
Advertise for event volunteers
Are you a not-for-profit organisation and holding an event or are you involved in a not-for-profit fundraising event? Members of The Centre for Volunteering can advertise their event and their request for volunteers via our Volunteer Referral Service and on GoVolunteer for free! Complete our online job advertisement form making sure to include the details of your event, how many volunteers you need and what they will be doing. Please make sure that you give at least a four week lead time to the date of your event.Juliana Collins, Community Volunteer Coordinator, Manly Council wrote...
Thank you so much for your support in assisting me with volunteers for our Manly Jazz Festival - I can't express how appreciative I am!!! We had such a fantastic result with some amazing volunteers assisting us, we had a total of 38 volunteers during the 3 day event and 13 of these were Event Volunteers from Volunteering NSW, with many other enquiries that we simply could not fit on the roster!!!! It was an amazing outcome, we will definitely use your Event Database again especially for such large scale events, the (money) would definitely be money well spent.It was useful having volunteers who have been exposed to the event environment before, our events team provided fantastic feedback, even stating we had the best bunch of volunteers this year EVER.
Historic House Trust wrote of our event matching service...
"... our volunteer target for this event has been reached. I would particularly like to thank [The Centre's Events Team] for their assistance. We received an outstanding response once the email was sent out from The Centre for Volunteering and I attribute our rapid success in achieving our recruitment goal to the use of this service.If you're not a member of The Centre for Volunteering, find out how you can become a member today.