The health benefits of volunteering at a free, weekly, 5 km event in the UK: A cross-sectional study of volunteers at parkrun

Steve Haake; Helen Quirk; Alice Bullas

doi:10.1371/journal.pgph.0000138

The health benefits of volunteering at a free, weekly, 5 km event in the UK: A cross-sectional study of volunteers at parkrun

PLOS Glob Public Health. 2022 Feb 24;2(2):e0000138. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000138. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Steve Haake¹, Helen Quirk², Alice Bullas¹

Affiliations

¹ The Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
² School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, Sheffield, United Kingdom.

Abstract

This paper investigates the motives for first participating in parkrun and its impact for those who volunteered compared to those who did not volunteer. A cross-sectional survey was emailed to parkrun registrants, resulting in 60,680 survey returns from parkrun participants who self-identified as volunteers only (n = 681), runners/walkers who volunteered (n = 21,928) or runners/walkers who did not volunteer (38,071). Two survey questions were analysed in this paper: (1) their motives for first participating in parkrun as a volunteer or runner/walker; and (2) the perceived impact on their health and wellbeing. More than half of respondents were female and were predominantly from a white ethnic background. Compared to runners/walkers who volunteered, those who volunteered exclusively were older, more likely to be retired and more likely to be inactive at registration. Exclusive volunteers were motivated by wanting to give something back to the community (45.8%), to feel part of a community (26.1%), to help people (24.5%) or because they were unable to run (21.1%). Runners/walkers who volunteered were more likely to volunteer because they felt obliged to (49.3%). A large proportion of exclusive volunteers reported improvements to connections with others such as feeling part of a community (83.5%), the number of new people met (85.2%) and time spent with friends (45.2%). While mental and physical health were ranked low by volunteers as a motive (4.7% and 2.7% respectively), improvements were reported by 54.5 and 29.3% respectively. The data shows that volunteering at parkrun without participating as a runner or walker can deliver some of the components of the Five Ways to Wellbeing advocated by the NHS. The characteristics of parkrun (free, regular, local, accessible and optional) make it a viable social prescribing offer that can be used as a model for other community events seeking to attract volunteers.

Copyright: © 2022 Haake et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Grants and funding

The parkrun Health and Wellbeing Survey 2018 was partially funded by parkrun to supported the roles of AB and HQ in the delivery of the survey and collection of respondent data. Chrissie Wellington and Mike Graney at parkrun supported the creation of the original survey and facilitated access to parkrun registrant and participation data. For additional research for the manuscript, HQ was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Public Health Research (SPHR) post-doctoral launching fellowship, while AB and SH were funded internally by Sheffield Hallam University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.