Volunteering seems to be

going out of fashion.
I was in the local charity shop yesterday. I was called in to do something for which there is an occasional need. The manager there knows that she can call on me if necessary. She also knows that I can't volunteer on a regular basis.
   "You do enough," she told me. I am not sure I do even though I try. 
I am also conscious that the people who work there are not getting any younger. One of them, P... is 92. She spends a day a week there. It is something she has done since she retired thirty-two years ago.  She is still physically able, alert, capable and an information resource that will be missed when she finally gives up.  
But there are supposed to be younger people there. They are not exactly "volunteers". They are people on "Newstart" - or unemployment benefits. To get "Newstart" you need to be actively looking for work (and be able to show it) and you also need to be doing some "voluntary" work if at all possible. There is, supposedly, a queue of people who "want to volunteer".  They are told it will look good on their job applications. 
It might look good on their job applications if they had been volunteering from their school days.  There was a boy in this district who desperately wanted a job. He knew he would need one the moment he turned sixteen. His family was going to need the little extra he would be able to earn working in perhaps the supermarket or the greengrocer - both of which make a point of employing young students. When he started high school he went to the then manager of the charity shop and told her what he wanted to do and why. She listened, wondered if it would actually work and told him to come and talk to her again at the end of the term if he was really interested.  If he came she would find things for him to do.
He went back. He volunteered until he could get a paid job and help his family out. Now he still does odd jobs for the shop if he gets a chance because the organisation helped him. He will probably volunteer in one way or another all his life. He is all too rare.  
But what of all those other people who "volunteer" only because they must? Almost all of them give up. They "can't be bothered". They don't like the work and more. Some of them have complained to me about all this while we are sitting there filling out forms and I am helping them write applications. Those people almost certainly won't make the best employees.I would not want to employ them.
Why should a 92yr old still feel she "must" be there on a very cold morning when a 19yr old who is unemployed resents being there at all?
Could we start getting much younger people, those just starting high school perhaps, into the volunteering habit? Would that help? We need volunteers.