These are the consequences of decades of under-investment of money, new ideas, new approaches. It is a trained, measured, mentored, eminently respectable kind of volunteering. This may sound like an unfair challenge to people whose efforts literally keep the nation moving. Because it is time they looked at two areas in particular. Sometimes it remains muddled about what people should get back, uncomfortable with any form of payment or reward - stuck in another age where doing good really ought to be painful or unpleasant, a penance for enjoying material riches.
Many people still believe it has to hurt to work.
It's a puritanical assumption that somehow, if it isn't thankless, it isn't proper volunteering. The other area of concern is the link between volunteers and the communities they serve. All too often it is still modelled on the nineteenth-century idea that volunteering is done to poor people, who are duly grateful. It is probably reciprocal. It probably asks what people can give back - concentrating on their forgotten abilities, skills and care than on their disabilities and problems.