The last few weeks, we’ve had some unusual experiences with volunteering and pro bono work. We don’t need to list names, but volunteering seemed to be a way to abuse the good nature of someone for free. We know that NGOs/NPOs are struggling, and we generally have good hearts, but there is limit to what a volunteer can and should do.
There’s a version of the volunteering conversation that flatters everyone involved. The organisation talks about mission and impact. The volunteer or intern talks about wanting to give back, build skills, make a difference. Everyone smiles. And then, somewhere in week three, the volunteer is writing copy for next year’s annual report, attending meetings they were never briefed for, and wondering when exactly their “learning experience” started looking so much like a job without a salary.
This isn’t a cynical take on volunteering. Volunteering is genuinely valuable — to organisations, to communities, and to the people doing it. But the sector’s language around it is often soft in ways that create real problems. Words like “opportunity,” “exposure,” and “giving back” are sometimes substitutes for clear thinking about what the relationship actually is. When organisations don’t communicate honestly, and when individuals don’t know their own rights and limits, good intentions produce bad outcomes on both sides.
Here’s an attempt to map the territory honestly.
The Three Categories — And Why Conflating Them Is a Problem
Before anything else, it’s worth getting clear on what we’re actually talking about, because “volunteer,” “intern,” and “pro bono contributor” mean genuinely different things, and organisations routinely use them interchangeably to their own advantage.
Volunteering means offering time freely, for public service or humanitarian purposes, without expectation of payment. Under the US Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a true volunteer gives their services on a part-time basis, does not displace regular paid employees, and does not perform work that would otherwise be done by paid staff. This last point is sharper than it sounds. If a nonprofit is using a volunteer to do something they’d otherwise have to hire someone for, that arrangement is legally and ethically murky — sometimes crossing into territory where the person is functionally an unpaid employee regardless of what the contract says.
Interning is more complicated. Interns can be volunteers, in which case they’re unpaid, or employees, in which case they receive compensation. The National Council of Nonprofits takes the position that compensating interns is the more equitable choice — because unpaid internships disproportionately disadvantage women, people of colour, and anyone who can’t afford to work for free. This amounts to social dumping. Roughly 70% of nonprofits use unpaid interns, compared to fewer than 30% of for-profit organisations. Nonprofits cite budget constraints. The people excluded from those “opportunities” cite something more fundamental. In these strange times, some jobs ads are masquerading as internships. A position wanting completed degree with five years of experience isn’t an internship. It’s an thinly veiled unpaid job listing.
Pro bono work is different again. Pro bono — from the Latin pro bono publico, for the public good — means professional services donated to those who need them, by someone whose normal work involves those services. A lawyer advising a charity on its governance structure is doing pro bono work. A graphic designer creating campaign materials for a refugee organisation is doing pro bono work. A marketing consultant building a comms strategy is doing pro bono work. The key distinction from volunteering, for tax purposes, is that pro bono services can often be deducted as professional expenses, whereas general volunteering cannot. Organisations handling pro bono relationships should document them properly and treat contributors as the skilled professionals they are.
The problem is what happens when these categories bleed into each other without anyone saying so. A person who comes in as a “volunteer” but is doing the work of a full-time staff member isn’t really a volunteer — and if a nonprofit unintentionally treats volunteers like employees, it risks fines, claims for back pay, and liability under wage laws, even in the US. The person on the other side of that arrangement has been exploited, regardless of how the opportunity was framed when they applied.
Red Flags Before You Even Start
The clearest signal of how an organisation treats its volunteers and interns is how they handle the process of bringing people in. A disorganised, disrespectful application process is not a sign of a small organisation under pressure — it’s a preview of what working with them will actually be like.
Long, multi-stage interview processes for unpaid roles should be an immediate yellow flag. A 90-minute competency-based interview and a paid take-home task (stop submitting free work) are standard for a salaried position with a proper job description. For a volunteer role, that process demands significant time from someone who will receive nothing financially in return. It signals that the organisation hasn’t thought carefully about what it’s asking — or worse, that it has, and doesn’t care. Not everyone is a fit for every organization, even when volunteering, but a competitive interview isn’t part of the process.
Pre-assignment “tasks” that look suspiciously like actual work are a major red flag. If you’re being asked to write a strategy document, create a content plan, or produce a research brief as part of your application, the organisation may be extracting free labour under the guise of an assessment. Legitimate pre-tasks are short, theoretical, and genuinely evaluative. An unpaid internship is exploitative if it involves deception on the part of the employer or a failure to provide meaningful training or education — and a work-heavy pre-task with no feedback loop and no subsequent offer is exactly that.
Vague or absent role descriptions mean nobody has thought through what you’ll actually be doing. This isn’t charming. It usually means you’ll end up filling whatever gaps appear, doing work that doesn’t develop your skills and doesn’t advance anyone’s goals consistently. Organisations should document expectations in writing — in an offer letter, a position description, or at minimum a written summary of what the role involves. If they can’t do that, they’re not ready for a volunteer or intern.
Not knowing what they want from you is different from having a flexible role. Some organisations genuinely don’t know what they’re looking for yet, and are hoping that whoever comes in will figure it out with them. That might work out fine, but it tends to produce a situation where the volunteer does a lot of unpaid exploration and the organization keeps the results. If you’re hearing “we’ll figure it out together” at the opening stage rather than in a genuine collaborative framing, push for clarity before you commit.
And one that’s specifically worth naming in the nonprofit and education sectors: requiring full-time hours for an unpaid role. There’s a piece by a student in a Medium article that describes a Danish NGO expecting 37-hour weeks, for six months, entirely unpaid, from international students. When she raised this as exploitative, a representative told her: “If you don’t like it, move to another country.” This is not an outlier. The irony of human rights organisations running exploitative labour practices is not subtle, and it is very common.
What Good Looks Like: Onboarding, Mentorship, and Real Integration
The difference between a well-run and a poorly-run volunteer or internship programme is usually visible within the first two weeks. The best programmes share a few characteristics that aren’t complicated, but do require deliberate effort from the organisation.
A proper onboarding process means more than handing someone a handbook and hoping for the best. It means covering the organisation’s mission and values in a way that actually connects to the role, explaining key policies in plain language rather than burying them in documents, introducing the person to their immediate team, and — critically — letting them know who to contact when they have questions. The goal is reinforcing the person’s decision to show up, not just processing them. These are people giving their time freely. They should feel, from day one, that the organisation knows this.
A mentor or buddy matters more than most organisations realise. Pairing new volunteers or interns with an experienced person creates social connection, reduces isolation, provides an informal learning channel, and makes newcomers feel genuinely welcomed rather than administratively processed. It also gives the new person a named contact they can go to with the questions they wouldn’t put in a formal email — the small confusions and uncertainties that, if unaddressed, accumulate into quiet disengagement. A 2024 report cited in nonprofit HR resources found that onboarding with mentorship produces stronger organisational integration and job satisfaction — findings that apply as much to unpaid contributors as to salaried staff.
Mentors should be matched thoughtfully — by area of work, by learning style where possible, and by temperament where that can be assessed. The mentor’s role isn’t to supervise. It’s to orient.
Regular check-ins in the early weeks are non-negotiable. Daily touchpoints in the first week, then weekly through the first month, give new volunteers the chance to flag confusion before it calcifies. These don’t need to be long. A fifteen-minute check-in is enough to spot the person who is quietly drowning in unclear expectations. Most volunteer coordinators skip this because they’re busy. Approximately 35% of volunteers don’t return after their first engagement, and the organizations spending nothing on early relationship-building lose them without ever knowing what went wrong.
Meaningful work. This one should be obvious, but it isn’t. Volunteers and interns who are assigned work that exists only because someone has to do it — sorting email archives, filing paperwork, attending meetings without a clear role — learn very quickly that their contribution isn’t valued. Meaningful work means projects relevant to their skills and interests, genuine responsibility for defined outcomes, and involvement in decisions that affect their work. People give their time for intrinsic reasons. Those reasons don’t survive an extended encounter with busy-work.
Incorporating Volunteering Into Your Professional Life
For the individuals doing the volunteering, there’s a question that tends to go unasked: how does this actually fit with the rest of your work and life, and how do you extract real value from it?
The first answer is: be specific about what you’re trying to get from it. “Build skills” and “give back” are vague enough to mean anything, which means they’re not useful as criteria for evaluating whether a role is working for you. Are you trying to develop expertise in a particular area? Build a portfolio? Expand a professional network? Transition into the sector? Each of these goals produces different criteria for a good role.
The second answer is: think about the integration rather than the addition. Volunteering works best when it’s not something you bolt onto an already full life. The professionals who sustain it long-term tend to treat it as part of their professional identity — they choose roles that genuinely connect to their skills and interests, and they bring what they learn in one context into the other. A communications professional volunteering as a strategic comms advisor for an environmental NGO is doing more than giving back. They’re working in a low-stakes environment where they can try things they wouldn’t risk with a paying client. That’s valuable even before you get to the mission.
This is also why pro bono work, done well, can be more professionally rewarding than general volunteering. When the contribution is tied to your professional competencies, the feedback is more directly useful. The gaps you discover are the ones worth filling. The work shows up in your portfolio.
Document what you do. This sounds mercenary and isn’t. If you’ve spent six months improving an organisation’s donor communications, helped develop a volunteer training programme, or contributed to a grant application that got funded, that is real work with real outcomes. It belongs in your professional record. Many people treat volunteer experience as somehow less serious than paid work, and it shows in how they describe it — vaguely, apologetically, in a section at the bottom of the CV. That’s a mistake. The value of a volunteer hour reached $39.79 in 2024. The work is real. Describe it as such.
Protect your other commitments. One of the most common traps for volunteers, especially in the NGO and education sectors, is scope creep. You arrive for four hours a week and leave three months later spending fifteen. The mission is compelling, the team needs help, and the guilt of saying no to people doing important work is hard to navigate. But the person who takes on more than they can sustain doesn’t keep sustaining it. They burn out, and then they leave entirely — often in a way that leaves the organisation worse off than if they’d kept clear limits from the start.
Knowing When to Leave
This is the part that almost nobody talks about honestly, which means many volunteers stay too long, leave badly, or both.
About 35-44% of volunteers leave their roles annually. Turnover is normal, and most experienced nonprofit managers expect it. The problem isn’t leaving. It’s staying when you should have left, or leaving without warning when the departure could have been handled gracefully.
The signals that it’s time to reconsider are usually clear before people acknowledge them. Dreading every shift is data. Snapping at people you previously liked, cancelling without explanation, going through the motions — these aren’t minor fluctuations. They’re indicators. A 2022 UK study found that volunteers who ignored early signs of burnout left their roles on bad terms twice as often as those who stepped back sooner. The pattern matters more than the individual bad day.
Value misalignment is a legitimate reason to go. One in four US volunteers quits due to organizational disorganisation or value misalignment. If the organisation has changed direction, if the leadership is making decisions you find ethically difficult, if the original role has morphed into something you didn’t sign up for — those are real reasons, and you don’t owe anyone a justification beyond “this isn’t working for me.”
Life change is also enough. A new job, a family change, a health situation, a shift in priorities — these don’t need defending. About a quarter of volunteers stop for at least a year because of life changes, and most well-run organizations understand this because they’ve seen it many times.
When you do leave, give reasonable notice and say it clearly rather than fading out. Fading out — reducing your hours gradually, becoming less responsive, eventually disappearing — is the default for many volunteers because it feels gentler. It’s actually harder for the organisation to manage than a direct conversation. Tell the relevant person that you’re stepping back, give some indication of timeline, and offer to document what you were working on if that’s useful. You don’t owe anyone a dramatic explanation. You do owe them enough respect to let them plan.
The framing that I find most useful here: volunteering is a relationship. Good relationships require honesty about what’s working and what isn’t, and they end with care rather than simply stopping. The organizations that have made you feel valued deserve a proper goodbye. The ones that haven’t still deserve a clean exit, if only because burning bridges in small sectors is usually pointless.
A Note to Organizations
The responsibility for making this work doesn’t sit only with the person giving their time. Organizations that want to attract and keep good volunteers need to treat them as what they are: skilled people making a real choice about where to put their energy.
That means being honest in role descriptions about what the work actually involves. It means not running a six-stage recruitment process for an unpaid position. It means not asking someone to produce strategic work in an application and then not offering them the role. It means paying interns where that is possible, and being explicit about why it isn’t when it genuinely isn’t. It means having onboarding that treats the person’s first week as important. It means pairing people with mentors. It means checking in early rather than assuming everything is fine.
Only 15% of US nonprofits have a responsible AI use policy — and a comparable fraction, one suspects, have a properly documented volunteer management policy. The organizations that invest in the infrastructure of volunteer relationships — written expectations, structured onboarding, regular feedback, clear exit processes — are the ones that retain people. The ones that don’t tend to recycle through high turnover and wonder why the committed contributors keep disappearing.
There’s a version of the volunteering conversation where this all works. Where organisations are honest about what they need and what they can offer. Where volunteers and interns are clear about what they’re there for and what their limits are. Where the line between contributing and being taken advantage of is kept visible, and someone is actually watching it. That conversation is more complicated than the standard language of mission and impact and opportunity. But it’s the one worth having.
Sources and further reading: FLSA Volunteer Guidelines — US Department of Labor · Employee or Volunteer? — Nonprofit Risk Management Center · Interns: Employee or Volunteer — National Council of Nonprofits · Internships: Golden Opportunity or Labour Exploitation? — Welcome to the Jungle · Unpaid Internships in NGOs — Medium/Awaken Nomad · Volunteer Management Strategy — VolunteerHub · Nonprofit Onboarding Best Practices — Mission Edge · Volunteer Onboarding Process — Teachfloor · Knowing When to Stop Volunteering — Emerge Bristol · Pro Bono vs Volunteer — Galaxy Digital · Wage and Hour Laws for Volunteers and Interns — Ward and Smith · Volunteer Burnout — Good People Map · Unpaid Internships — Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
