28 COMMUNITY | LEGAL SECTOR SUSTAINABILITY INSIGHT 2016 NON LEGAL VOLUNTEERING 26 25 15 4 1 3 2 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 Strucured programs Board Participation Paid time allocation Charity Events and appeals Blood donations NGO Secondments Tutoring and mentoring Skilled non-legal volunteering is a critical input to the not for profit and community sector and is highly valued by recipients. Many of these organisations depend on the experience and knowledge of lawyers, managers and support staff for a broad range of non-legal roles including governance, planning, management and administration functions. In many cases law firms combine these types of non-legal volunteering with pro bono legal and financial contributions in Community partnerships which greatly improves the delivery of targeted impacts, a trend that also increasing in businesses across in Australia. The 2016 Giving Australian Report described a series of drivers for supporting volunteering and giving: • seeking to do good by making a positive contribution to the community • generating social impact • employee expectations • a business desire to attract and retain the best people (employee engagement) • a strategy for the community to allow the business to operate and implement its plans. In a similar way to pro bono legal programs, non-legal volunteering programs also provide employees with an opportunity to practise different skills, build new teams and bolster the firm’s reputation within the community. Sharing the positive impacts and stories from non- legal volunteering is generally less constrained than for legal volunteering which provides additional opportunities for a firm to promote these achievements to internal and external stakeholders. The 2016 Giving Australian Report also found that business volunteering in the workplace is increasing, with almost three-quarters of large businesses allocating paid time for volunteering (ninety percent of these increasing resources to volunteering over the last ten years). The average participation rate by staff was twenty-one percent. Half of all corporations managing a formal program sought to integrate workplace volunteering through more in-depth community partnerships. VOLUNTEERING COORDINATION INITIATIVES 76% 6% 9% 9% Yes No Currently in Development Not Reported Number of firms