The CoV project has 4 questions that we want to explore:

1. How do volunteers negotiate biographical, contextual and institutional factors to reach decisions regarding moves between forms of civic participation in later life?
2. How do moves out of volunteering due to age-related conditions impact on the wellbeing of older people?
3. What are the challenges and opportunities for volunteer managers in managing older people as they exit volunteering from a particular institution?
4. How can volunteer management practices be enhanced to improve the volunteers’ experience of moving out of volunteering and the volunteer managers’ experiences of supporting this process?

The aim is to provide a rich understanding of the experiences of older volunteers, and the staff managing them, as they move out of one form of civic participation (and potentially into another).

Our initial focus is on cultural heritage organisations but we will take our findings and use a national survey to determine whether these reflect the experience of volunteer managers across all volunteer-involving sectors.

The findings will also be the starting point for conversations with partners with the aim of co-producing a set of principles and guidelines for volunteer-involving organisations to enable them to optimise their volunteer exit strategies. We hope that this will lead to the development and adoption of new volunteer management practices in multiple volunteer-involving sectors in the UK and internationally.