6. Ensure that volunteering is a potent, dynamic and unifying social force for community benefit by acknowledging and accepting that it is a diverse and evolving activity.

Volunteering was until recent years regarded as the province of the middle class, middle aged woman. So entrenched was this stereotype that it remains one of our greatest challenges to refashioning the image and building an awareness of the true scope and scale of volunteering. Of all the tasks that lie ahead of us, if we are to maintain the relevance of volunteering, the most important is to recognise and celebrate it as a changing, dynamic and inclusive movement for the common good. 

Outcomes Sought

6.1	Volunteer-involving organisations have strategies in place to involve young people including redesigned job roles, short-term projects, group volunteering, and the needs, aspirations and motivations of young volunteers are accepted as valid.
6.2	The concept of corporate volunteering is widely accepted and encouraged as a legitimate way in which skills are transferred from the business sector to the voluntary sector for the benefit of the community.
6.3	Volunteer-involving organisations have strategies in place to remove barriers to the involvement of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
6.4	Organisations have strategies in place to address gender imbalance.
6.5	The community work and support networks of indigenous Australians are recognised as valuable variations to the more formal activities typically accepted as volunteering.
6.6	Innovative forms of online volunteering opportunities are available to volunteers isolated through disability or locality or restricted by paid employment to volunteering outside business hours.
6.7	Innovative forms of volunteering opportunities to address complex social problems.