Editorial

Giving and volunteering are critical concepts with multiple impacts on
lives and environments worldwide. With the right antecedents, these
impacts channel through those organisations that ask for or receive
contributions of time, money, goods and advocacy. In Australia, giving
and volunteering enable or extend the missions and infrastructure of
the 57,500 charities on the national registry (ACNC 2019), the Australian
Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), and much of the
remaining estimated 600,000 organisations in the non-profit ecosystem
in this country (Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit
Studies 2014). The 2019 ACNC report notes that donations, including
bequests, represented $9.9 billion of the $146.1 billion total charity
revenue for 2017. The report also highlights a drop of $600 million
in these donations. Further, volunteers totally operate nearly half of
Australia’s charities; across all charities, these number 3.3 million people.