Abstract:

The April 2021 ANUpoll, the seventh in the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods COVID-19 Impact monitoring program, collected data on volunteering and this can be combined with data on volunteering collected from the same group of individuals collected in late 2019 prior to COVID-19 and in April 2020 during the early stages of the pandemic in Australia.

This paper provides data on changes to volunteering and voluntary work since COVID-19, and the impacts of these changes. The proportion of adult Australians doing voluntary work has fallen very substantially since COVID-19. This fall appears to have had a large impact on life satisfaction in Australia, particularly up until October 2020.