Welsh volunteers give 145 million hours a year. Is any of yours on paper?

Wales runs on volunteers. WCVA puts it at around 938,000 of them, giving 145 million hours a year — worth an estimated £1.7 billion. It's the quiet engine behind every youth club, food bank, community group and charity in the country.

Here's the uncomfortable bit: almost none of that value is ever written down by the people creating it.

You run the session. You drive to the hall, set up, deliver, clear away, drive home. A trustee gives an evening. Three volunteers give a Saturday. It mattered — and then it evaporates, because nobody recorded it. So when a funder asks “what difference did you make this year?”, or a commissioner asks “what’s your social value?”, you reach for a story. Stories are lovely. They don’t sit well next to a spreadsheet of other applicants who turned up with numbers.

Why this is changing

Social value used to be a nice-to-have. In Wales it’s now baked into law: the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act duties commenced in March 2026, with annual reporting from April — so social value is measured, reported and asked about across public contracts. Grant funders have moved the same way. “Tell us about your impact” increasingly means “show us,” and “show us” increasingly means a number, not a paragraph.

You don’t have to be an economist

The good news: you don’t have to invent the maths. There are recognised, well-established ways to put a pound value on time and outcomes. The UK Social Value Bank, developed by HACT, values the wellbeing difference activities make to people and is widely used across housing, charities and public bodies. Others take a deliberately conservative route and value volunteer hours at the minimum wage, so no one can accuse them of inflating it. Either way the principle is simple: the hours your people give are worth something real, and there’s a defensible figure for them.

What that looks like in practice

A two-hour community session with three volunteers isn’t “some of our team helped out.” It’s six hours of contributed time — costed, dated, and attached to who it was for. Do that across a year and the picture stops being anecdotal. It becomes the evidence behind your next funding bid, your annual report, your trustees’ meeting, your case to a commissioner.

That’s exactly what Owl Impact is for. You log the session — who delivered it, how long, how many people it reached — and a couple of minutes later a costed social value report lands in your inbox, in pounds, ready to use. No consultant, no methodology headache, no spreadsheet. Just the work you already did, finally written down in a language funders understand.

The £1.7 billion Wales gives every year is real. The only question is whether your share of it is on paper when someone asks.

Sources: WCVA, The Values and Value of Volunteering · HACT UK Social Value Bank