Thing is Stuart, it's the dull and boring jobs which people shy away from... but they still need to be done!
Minor things like sticking posters up plugging a fundraising event, or emptying food donation bins and dropping food off to fosterers, or organising a raffle, sponsored event, holding a flag day, keeping tags on when 2nd vacs are due, advertising specific homing appeals, managing catchat pages, setting up viewings, selling things on Ebay, running a recycling scheme (like Pudding), trapping ferals, vet runs, homechecks, issuing neutering vouchers .... it goes on and on and on!
Often all those little jobs don't actually take long in themselves, but ad all the little jobs together and they ad up and make an enormous headache if only 2 or 3 people are trying to do the lot. So Stuart I am sure there is something you could do to contribute to the running of the branch if you wanted to... ensuring all shops, vets and public notice boards have information or appeal posters on them would only take a few hours a month for example, but CP fights for every bit of publicity they can get and even in our area we still have lots of people who have never heard of CP.
So fostering and cat cuddling is not all what CP volunteers do and we always struggle for people to do the dull bits.
We have been blessed lately with some really proactive and reliable people... like the person who empties our food bins from the vets every thursday. Works like a Swiss watch and never misses a week. They do it on their way shopping and drop it off to one of us on the way back. It probably takes them 20/30 minutes a week but vital for us as we can relax as we know it's done and the food is there when we need it.
