What lengths are you willing to go to for a volunteer?

What lengths are organisations willing to go to to accommodate their volunteers? Or perhaps more importantly, what lengths should they be willing to go to?

I've recently been working with an organisation that says they are uncompromising on the time commitment required from volunteers, but has recently been flexible for a long-standing volunteer who has had to reduce their hours. On another occasion an organisation needed more volunteers urgently but seemed reluctant to investigate possible ways of enabling a potential volunteer with a disability to get involved.

This got me thinking - how much should we be willing to bend for a volunteer?

To me, there are two key considerations here:
1. What's workable and manageable for the organisation and the people it supports.
2. What fits in with our ethos as charities.

The first of these may tend to bring us down on the side of not being flexible - we exist to do a certain thing, or to support a certain group, and there are things which are fixed within that to allow us to provide the best support and do the best we can. However, the second should steer us more towards flexibility - we want to support people, to enable them to get involved, and to be there for everyone.

My argument is that flexibility can be extremely beneficial to the charity itself, and can help us to achieve our goals. By enabling more people and a more diverse range of people to get involved with volunteering you will be spreading your reach, becoming more representative, and broadening your volunteer base. This can be challenging for volunteer managers, who may have little time to think creatively about a role or provide support for something out of the ordinary. Of course there will be times when you have to stick to a certain rule (for example if you need volunteers to go into schools they will need to be available at some point during school hours) but these should be kept as minimal as possible, with flexibility to accommodate not only those volunteers who we already know are great, but also those who could be great, shouldn't there?