I was sixteen when I started volunteering at Oxfam, working toward my Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award. It's the reason I got my next job in retail, and it's where I first understood half of what this site is now built on. That opportunity is getting harder to find, at exactly the point young people need it most.
UK youth unemployment reached 14.7% in mid-2026 — roughly one in seven young people looking for work, the highest rate in over a decade. There were 1.01 million 16 to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training in early 2026, according to the ONS. Asked directly what's stopping them, young people in the Youth Voice Census 2025 put a lack of work experience at the top of the list — above anxiety, above a lack of local jobs.
Formal volunteering in England has fallen from 45% to 28% participation over a decade, and the share of young people volunteering has dropped from 24% to 17% in the most recent survey. Only 6–7% of 16 to 44-year-olds had volunteered at all in the past year. So the two things happen at once: it's harder than it's been in a decade to get a first job, and the informal route people used to take to build experience for that first job — volunteering — is quietly shrinking under the same cost-of-living pressure.
The average charity shop relies on around 20 volunteers, and roughly 17% of charity shop volunteers are under 25. It's genuinely structured, too — the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Volunteering Section asks for about an hour a week over several months, with a real supervisor and a real outcome, not just a token gesture. A CIPD survey found 67% of employers rate entry-level candidates with voluntary experience as more employable. That's not a small thing for a sixteen-year-old with no CV yet.
When a shop closes — and I've written about why that's happening more often right now — it's not just a retail job that disappears. It's a reference, a confidence-builder, and often someone's actual first experience of a workplace, all gone with it.
Charity shops are also one of the places Youth Offending Teams look to place young people serving a referral order — a court-ordered contract for 10 to 17-year-olds that includes a reparation element, explicitly defined as things like helping out with local charities. I had a young man referred to us this way after being caught without a ticket on the Underground, and he was struggling to find anywhere that would take him on. That's part of why I pushed to get an enhanced DBS certificate in place — not every organisation that wants to help is set up to actually supervise someone properly, and that gap is exactly where young people fall through.
How easy it is for a sixteen-year-old to find somewhere that will take a chance on them — DofE, a referral order, or just wanting a foot in the door — is a genuine measure of a community's health, not a nice-to-have on top of it. Losing shops means losing that ladder for whoever needed it next.
If you run a shop, charity or small organisation and could take on a volunteer — DofE, a Youth Offending Team referral, or just someone wanting real experience — it's worth doing properly: a supervisor who actually has time, and the right checks in place before you start. If you're a young person struggling to find a placement locally, get in touch and I'll try to point you somewhere useful.