The leaders of the three main political parties gathered together with a host of youth charity leaders at Buckingham Palace today as Prince Charles launched a new volunteering campaign that aims to get half of all young people involved in social action by 2020.

Step Up To Serve is funded with a £6m pot from the Cabinet Office, which will be distributed via grants of between £300,000 and £500,000 to youth and volunteering charities.  The deadline for applications to the Youth Social Acton Journey Fund closed earlier this week.

According to the Step Up To Serve website, the goal is to almost double the number of young people participating in social action from 29 per cent to over 50 per cent by 2020 - an additional 1.7 million young people engaging in social action for the first time.

To meet this goal, “we will need to increase activity across the country, by engaging both existing organisations and new ones", the site states.

“Youth organisations agree the need for an overarching campaign to galvanise action and support, and to recognise quality.”

The site contains pledges to support the campaign from 26 youth and volunteering charities and umbrella bodies, including the British Youth Council, NCVO, Girlguiding, vInspired and the Canal and River Trust.

Prince Charles wrote an article about Step Up To Serve in last weekend’s Mail on Sunday, in which he stated that some teenage murders are the “extreme result of too many young people no longer guided through a rite of passage; young people who would benefit from the guidance and help of organisations such as the Guides, Scouts, cadets and other youth organisations. However, these are all groups which are hampered in their growth by a lack of adult volunteers.”

He concluded:  “I wanted to convene and launch this campaign as I reached my 65th birthday in order to support all those who are engaging young people to say ‘I will’, and to underline the vital contribution youngsters can make with their service to the community.”

Hospital volunteering programme launches

Also today, Nesta has launched a hospital volunteering programme. ‘Helping in Hospitals’, with £1.5m from the Innovation Fund run jointly by Nesta and the Cabinet Office Centre for Social Action. This programme coincides with the publication of a new report from the King’s Fund which estimates that every £1 invested in volunteering in the NHS yields services worth £11 in return.

It also comes on the back of a successful pilot at King’s College Hospital, funded by Nesta and the Cabinet Office, to significantly increase the number of volunteers. According to Nesta, applicants responded “in their thousands” and the hospital now deploys more than 1,000 volunteers a month, up from 150 a year ago.

King’s College Hospital has reported a simultaneous increase in patient satisfaction.

Acevo CEO Sir Stephen Bubb recently wrote to David Cameron and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to suggest that the government provide funding for thousands of extra NHS volunteers. He said that Acevo could work with the British Red Cross, Age UK and RVS, helping them to expand their existing programmes in hospitals identified by NHS England as needing more support.