Should our organisation be reimbursing care costs to volunteers?
You are not legally obligated to reimburse someone’s care costs. However, if you choose not to then you may well be excluding parents on low incomes with pre-school children, and carers from volunteering with you. Although it may be seen as expensive to reimburse volunteers care costs, it is good practice, and it means that you are enabling the huge numbers of carers in the community to offer their skills and time to you. Under all definitions of ‘reasonable out-of-pocket expenses’ care costs are included. It’s fine to reimburse receipted care costs and this will have no minimum wage implications and no effect on volunteers benefits.
