Merseyside Sports Partnership (MSP), along with other local partners, is working with organisations such as Sport England, both at a National and Regional level, to support links between the local volunteering infrastructure and the local sports environment and to encourage even more people to engage in sports volunteering.

To help progress with this aim, MSP continually invests in volunteer management within sport, both to ensure high and consistent standards of good practice in the sector, and to work towards attracting an even more diverse range of young volunteers.

Recent research carried out by Sport England demonstrates exactly how important sport volunteers are and what a significant contribution the voluntary sports sector makes to volunteering activity as a whole:

• There are 5,821,400 sports volunteers, that's 14% of the adult population

• The sporting sector makes the single biggest contribution to total
   volunteering in England, with 26% of all volunteers citing "sport" as their
   main area of interest

• They contribute one billion hours each year to sport, equivalent to
   720,000 additional full time paid workers

• The value of the time contributed by sports volunteers in England is estimated at over £14 billion