Skilled volunteers play a crucial role in voluntary sector organisations, particularly within local culture and heritage sectors. However, increasing volunteer shortages have now reached a critical level, presenting huge challenges for preserving important heritage assets. Evans (2024) reports that 40% of UK voluntary organisations are unable to meet core objectives due to insufficient capacity.  
 In this context, the future of heritage railways is increasingly uncertain. As custodians of Britain’s industrial and transport history, they deliver socio-economic value to communities. Yet rising costs, ageing infrastructure, and sustained financial losses place the sector under severe strain (BBC, 2024). The Great Central Railway (GCR) exemplifies these challenges, reporting losses of £228,434 in 2025 and £671,663 in 2024. Such figures underscore the urgent need for new models of sustainability. For many heritage railways, reducing reliance on paid staff through skilled volunteer expansion now represents the only viable route to survival. Recruiting, developing, and retaining younger volunteers has therefore become imperative. 
 Like many voluntary organisations, the GCR depends on an ageing volunteer base. Internal data show a median volunteer age of 66, with a historical median joining age of 53, a widening gap driven by long-term decline in youth participation (Black, 2025). This mirrors trends in the East Midlands: the proportion of 16-to-24-year-olds volunteering monthly fell from 29% in 2015 to just 17% in 2023 (DCMS, 2025). Previous strategies, often grounded in human resource management practices that frame volunteering as transaction offering employability benefits through training, experience, and references (Black, 2023), have failed to reverse this decline. Addressing this challenge requires more than incremental reform; it demands a transformational rethinking of the volunteer relationship. 
This research will respond to these challenges through the design, piloting, and evaluation of a Youth Transformation Programme at the GCR. The programme will establish structured pathways for learning, participation, and leadership, offering young people meaningful experiences while strengthening operational resilience. By securing the GCR’s volunteer pipeline, the project will safeguard its future while supporting youth development in Leicestershire. While the programme is not exclusively targeted at neurodivergent young people, a group facing barriers to competitive employment (DWP, 2025), heritage railways hold particular appeal to this demographic (Black, 2025). 
 
This project has been co-created with and is supported by researchers from Loughborough University, De ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ University, and partners at the Great Central Railway. The successful candidate for this project will be enrolled at Loughborough University. 
Project Aims
The overall aims of the project are:   
- To design a Youth Transformation Programme that equips young people with both technical and transferable skills needed to lead the GCR.     
- To evaluate the impact of transformational volunteering models in contrast to transactional approaches on engagement, civic participation, and long-term commitment to the GCR. 
- To explore the role of intergenerational knowledge transfer by pairing younger volunteers with experienced and retired professionals. 
- Create a youth-led social and citizenship group to embed young people’s voices in organisational decision-making. 
- Generate transferable insights and a replicable framework that can be shared with other heritage and culture organisations to address similar challenges in volunteer recruitment and leadership succession.   
Estimated thesis submission: