I spend my working life building the infrastructure behind community events - the power, the staging, the sound, the logistics that nobody notices until something goes wrong. I've known for a while that the people running these events were getting older, and that fewer young faces were coming through. It's the kind of thing you notice quietly, year on year, and file away. This week, I stopped filing it away.
We've just had confirmation from Coulsdon Manor Rotary - the Summer village fair on Grange Park, running for over 30 years, will not take place in 2027. It's the first time in three decades it won't happen. Not because interest has dried up. Because the Rotary club behind it has made the decision to formally close within the next six months, citing falling numbers and an ageing membership. There was no choice left.
Not because of money. Not because nobody wants it. Because there's nobody left to run it.
That stopped me in my tracks, but not because it was a surprise. It's because it crystallised something I'd been half-aware of for a long time: this isn't happening to one fair. It's happening to all of them, almost all at once, for the same reason - and that's the part that actually worries me.
The organisers of these events are, almost without exception, the same generation. The same people who joined their local Rotary or Round Table in their thirties are now in their sixties and seventies, still running the same fair, the same lights switch-on, the same fete. There was never a wave of thirty-somethings following ten years behind them to learn the ropes. Which means when this generation finally has to stop - not by choice, but because the body won't let them keep going - there isn't a staggered decline coming. There's a cliff edge. Dozens of community institutions built up over decades, run by people of a similar age, are on course to fold within the same few years of each other, simply because the clock ran out on all of them at once.
This isn't a feeling. It's a measured trend
The UK's Community Life Survey has tracked this for over a decade, and the numbers are stark. Regular formal volunteering in England - the once-a-month, show-up-and-do-the-work kind - has fallen from 27% of adults in 2013/14 to 17% now. Annual participation has dropped from 45% to 28% over the same period. Adults aged 25 to 34 are the least likely age group to volunteer regularly, at just 11%, while those aged 65 to 74 remain the backbone at 23%.
Rotary in Great Britain and Ireland puts numbers to exactly what I saw at that fair: around 40,000 members left, average age 71 - meaning the typical Rotarian isn't a decade from retiring off the committee, they're already well past the point most people stop taking on demanding volunteer work at all. When your entire membership sits within a narrow band at the top of that age range, decline doesn't arrive gradually. It arrives all together, in a short window, because everyone hits their limit at roughly the same time. Nottingham Trent University research found four in ten voluntary organisations can't recruit enough people to meet their own objectives. The Centre for Ageing Better estimates the post-pandemic falloff alone has cost 110 million volunteering hours a year from the over-50s - the exact group currently propping up most of these committees.
None of this is about charities running out of donors. It's about running out of hands.
Why money isn't the fix
Every committee I sit with would take more funding if offered. But money was never the blocker. You can fundraise your way to a healthier bank balance; you cannot fundraise your way to a new chairperson, a new events coordinator, a new person willing to spend six months of evenings organising licensing, stalls, and volunteers for one day in June.
The barrier is time and attention, not cash. Two-income households are now the default, which strips the slack out of people's weeks. Add social media's pull toward instant, low-effort engagement, and you get a generation that will happily attend - and does, in genuinely huge numbers - but sees no reason to be the one organising it. Community events run on delayed gratification: months of unglamorous graft for one day of payoff. That's a hard sell against a culture increasingly built around instant results.
The gap isn't interest - it's visibility and structure
Here's what convinces me this is fixable rather than terminal: there's no shortage of capable twenty- and thirty-somethings out there. The barrier isn't ability or even willingness. It's that these organisations, in their current form, are largely invisible to the people who could step in, and often structurally unwelcoming even when they are seen.
The data backs this up more than I expected. Reach Volunteering added over 16,000 new volunteers in 2024 and has seen volunteer-led groups on its platform grow from 69 in 2019 to 650 today. Save the Children reports 42% of new shop volunteers in 2025 were aged 18–24, up from 28% in 2021. The British Heart Foundation found 53% of its recruits were 16–24. So the appetite exists - it's just not landing on the traditional committee structure. Younger volunteers are choosing flexible, short-term, purpose-visible roles over the fixed-term, board-meeting, multi-year-commitment model that Rotary, Round Table, and most parish-level committees still run on.
That's the uncomfortable bit for organisations like the ones I work with: it may not be enough to advertise harder. Some of this structure needs to change. A committee built around Monday lunchtime meetings and a two-year term before you're even trusted with a task isn't going to catch someone who wants to turn up, help run the beer tent for one Saturday, and see the direct result.
The paperwork is making it worse
There's another piece to this that doesn't get talked about enough, and I feel qualified to say it because I write risk assessments and H&S documentation professionally, for a living, to a standard that has to satisfy insurers and licensing authorities. The organisers at Coulsdon Manor told me they'd had to submit over thirty separate documents to Croydon Council to run this fair. Not thirty pages - thirty distinct documents.
I understand why events need to be run properly. I spend a large part of my working week doing exactly that: risk assessments, method statements, electrical certification, the lot. It's not optional and I'm not arguing it should be. But there's a difference between running an event safely and burying a volunteer committee under a paperwork exercise that bears no relationship to the actual risk profile of a village fair with a bouncy castle and a cake stall. Thirty documents is the kind of submission I'd expect for a multi-day festival with pyrotechnics, temporary structures, and thousands of attendees - not a single-day community fair that's been running without incident for over 30 years.
That volume of documentation doesn't make the event safer. It makes it exhausting to organise, on top of everything else already stacked against these committees. Every hour an ageing volunteer spends filling in a form that adds no meaningful safety value is an hour not spent doing the parts of the job that actually matter - and it's one more reason nobody younger looks at the role and thinks it's worth taking on. If we want people to step into these committees, we have to stop making the entry price disproportionate to the risk being managed. Proportionate regulation protects people. Disproportionate regulation just adds another reason to give up.
What happens if nothing changes
I'm not being dramatic when I say some of these events have one, maybe two years left as things stand. But the part that should worry people more is that it's not just one or two events at risk - it's most of them, at once. Because the organisers are all roughly the same age, they're all approaching their limit on roughly the same timeline. This isn't a slow, staggered fade where a fair here and a fete there quietly stops over the next twenty years. It's a whole cohort of community institutions, built up over decades, all reaching the end of their current organisers' capacity within the same short window.
When the current handful of people on each committee can no longer physically do the job - and several have told me exactly that, this year - there is no one else on the list. The fair doesn't downsize. It stops. The Christmas lights don't get switched on. The PTA event calendar goes blank. And because it's happening to nearly everyone at the same time, there won't be a nearby example to learn from or borrow volunteers from - everyone's committee will be losing people in the same few years.
And the people who'll notice are the same people who show up every year without a second thought for who made it happen - until, one year, nobody does.
There is, for what it's worth, a flicker of hope attached even to Coulsdon's case. The Rotary club closing this one down has said a community-led group might come together to plan a fair for 2028, built on the goodwill and knowledge of the outgoing Rotarians. That's genuinely encouraging - but it's conjecture, not a plan, and it depends entirely on the kind of new people showing up that this whole piece is about. It proves the appetite to keep these things going is there. It doesn't yet prove the people will turn up to do it.
What actually needs to happen
- Local organisations need to talk about the problem publicly, not just internally in committee minutes nobody outside the group ever reads. Most people attending have no idea their local fair is one bad winter away from folding.
- Structures need to flex. Not every role needs a multi-year commitment. Splitting the work into smaller, visible, one-off jobs - running a single stall, doing one supplier call, marshalling for one day - lowers the barrier without lowering the standard.
- Councils need to scale documentation to actual risk. Thirty-plus documents for a single-day community fair is disproportionate and it's driving good people away from organising. Licensing authorities should be able to offer a genuinely lighter-touch, proportionate route for low-risk, long-running local events, rather than defaulting every application to the same paperwork load as a large commercial festival.
- Handover has to start before crisis point. Waiting until the current organiser physically can't continue means there's no time left to transfer twenty years of supplier contacts, licensing knowledge, and local relationships to someone new.
- This deserves national attention, not just local committee worry. A fair running for over 30 years quietly folding is a story. It's happening in villages and towns across the country at the same time, and it says something uncomfortable about what community life is actually built on - a shrinking, ageing pool of people doing it because nobody else will.
I run events for a living, which means I see the machinery behind the scenes that most people never think about - the licensing, the risk assessments, the 6am setup, the volunteers who've been doing this since before some of today's attendees were born. That's exactly why this hits differently for me. I know precisely how much unpaid, unglamorous graft sits behind a single good afternoon in a field. I know what it takes to keep the lights on for a fair that's run for over 30 years. And I know that when the people carrying that weight finally have to put it down, there's currently nobody stood ready to pick it up.
This isn't a temporary dip, and it isn't going to play out gently. It's a generation of institutional knowledge and civic effort about to retire, largely all at once, without a handover plan in place. If nothing changes, a lot of the fairs, fetes, and switch-on nights people assume are just part of the furniture of local life are going to disappear within the same few years of each other - not one at a time where you might not notice, but as a wave, right around the same point that all of us who've been quietly worried about this turn out to have been right.
I'd rather we noticed now, while there's still time to do something about it.
Ed Ralph, Director, Fusion Event Services