Ask Ash Kasibante what he does on a Saturday in the Chest, Heart & Stroke Scotland shop on Dumbarton Road and a grin breaks out before the answer does.

"Everything!" he laughs.

It is, by any measure, the right answer. The 23-year-old software engineering student at the University of Glasgow sorts donations, works the till, dresses the window, chats to the regulars and, when the playlist demands it, hums along to the sixties soul that drifts permanently out of the back room. He has been doing it, in one form or another, since the summer of 2021.

A pandemic project that stuck

Ash, who lives in Maryhill, did not set out to become a poster boy for young Scottish volunteering. He set out, like a lot of students in lockdown, to fight off boredom.

"It was during the pandemic that I first thought of volunteering," he says. "I was studying but there wasn't much else to do and I was really bored. I started to look around online for opportunities in my area and came across CHSS."

What began as a way to fill empty afternoons hardened, quietly, into something closer to a vocation. Five years on, he is a fixture at the Partick branch on weekends and through every university holiday, and a member of the charity's Health & Wellbeing Working Group — the volunteer panel that helps shape how CHSS supports the tens of thousands of Scots living with chest, heart and stroke conditions.

The balancing act

Software engineering is not famously a degree with spare hours bolted on. Ash shrugs the question off. The shop, he says, is the bit of the week that recharges him, not the bit that drains him.

"My volunteering experience wasn't what I expected," he says. "I didn't realise I would be working with so many people and become friends with people of all ages and backgrounds. There is always someone around to chat to or to hang out with after work."

He has, he admits, failed to drag a single coursemate down to Partick to join him — though several have wandered in to nose around the place where their friend disappears every weekend. "I think they like to see the place where I spend so much of my spare time."

What it means to the charity

Chest, Heart & Stroke Scotland has long described its shop volunteers as the engine room of a retail operation that raises vital funds for community support services across the country. In its public appeals, the charity highlights younger volunteers as bringing energy and fresh ideas, and says reliability and warmth with customers are the qualities it most values — a description that fits Ash neatly.

Part of a quiet movement

Ash is one of an estimated 1.2 million people who volunteer in Scotland each year, and one of a growing cohort of under-25s who, in the wake of the pandemic, have quietly rebuilt the country's volunteering base. Volunteer Scotland has repeatedly flagged students as central to the recovery of charity-shop networks battered by lockdown closures.

For Ash, the statistics are beside the point. The point is the regulars who ask after him, the colleagues who have become friends, and a growing fondness for Otis Redding.

"Volunteering is really important to me and has given me a lot," he says. "I'm really committed to CHSS and hope to work with the charity for a long time to come."

Glasgow, lucky thing, gets to keep him.