Every day in the UK, millions of people give their time to support the causes they care about and make a difference to the communities they live in.

Many do so as part of public services and, from school governors to special constables, volunteers are already a critical resource for the services we all rely on.

And yet we still massively underestimate the impact that volunteers could have on some of the biggest challenges facing communities.

Most councils have a volunteering strategy, but how many can honestly say they think strategically about how to mobilise the generosity and talents of citizens?

Over the past five years a movement has been growing in the US that shows us what might be possible.

Cities of Service started in New York when Mayor Bloomberg created NYC Service with a mission to engage millions of New Yorkers in solving the city's most pressing challenges.

They have trained almost 100,000 New Yorkers in CPR to help save lives, launched a massive programme of volunteer-led fitness classes to help people get healthy and reduced carbon emissions by painting millions of square feet of New York's roofs in reflective white paint.

Cities of Service has become a movement with over 170 American mayors putting citizen service at the heart of their strategic goals.

In Philadelphia, over 1,000 ‘graduation coaches' work with young people to make sure they complete college, student volunteers help high school students apply for college and hundreds of volunteers have completed neighbourhood projects.

Responding to the floods of 2010, Mayor Karl Dean launched the Nashville Waterways Recovery Project.

In a case study, with lessons for UK authorities dealing with the devastation caused by historic rainfalls, Mayor Dean's team organised volunteers to assess and clear miles of waterways, removing 35 tonnes of debris and planting hundreds of trees and ‘rain gardens' to prevent future flooding.

It is examples like these that inspired Nesta to support UK local government to join the Cities of Service movement. Working with the Cabinet Office and Bloomberg Philanthropies, we are supporting seven councils with grants and technical support to develop and implement their own service strategies.

In Bristol, mayor George Ferguson is targeting health and wellbeing and sustainable travel; Portsmouth City Council is focusing on volunteer tutoring and community resilience; Kirklees MBC is developing initiatives that reduce social isolation and loneliness; and Plymouth City Council's focus is healthy food and fuel poverty.

All four will appoint dedicated chief service officers: senior staff members working directly with the political leadership and dedicated to making service central to the way they pursue strategic goals.

Barnsley MBC, Swindon Council and Telford & Wrekin Council are targeting local priorities from safer and stronger communities to supporting older people to live independently.

They join London and Barcelona as the first to take the Cities of Service concept beyond the US in what many of us hope will become a global movement. We know it won't be plain sailing.

Critics will argue this is not anything new; that local government in the UK already mobilises volunteers. That is true to an extent, but the shift envisaged by Cities of Service is a significant one: putting citizens at the heart of strategies to tackle the most pressing local concerns.

It also demands a much sharper focus on impact. Cities of Service is not about numbers of volunteers, it is about the impact those volunteers have.

If you are relying on people's generosity and time to teach children to read, then you should know whether it is working.

How quickly are they advancing their reading? Are the volunteers using the best methods? Those same critics will argue that ‘service' is a US concept.

It is not British and we should not import it.  Language matters. We should learn from the 75,000 young people who have given 1.5 million hours of service for their communities through the National Citizenship Service.

For those young people, the language of service has meaning.  It is high time we reclaimed the civic ideal of service, something which the Prince of Wales recognised when he launched the Step Up to Serve campaign to get more young people engaged in social action.

There will also be questions about whether volunteers are doing jobs that should be the preserve of paid professionals.

This is sensitive territory on which I tread carefully.  Cities of Service is about increasing the resources and expertise available to make a difference to local issues.

It is not about replacing paid professionals with volunteers.  It is about creating more opportunities for citizens to be able to make a difference to issues that they care about.

That involves challenging some of our assumptions.  In response to a recent blog post of mine on the role of volunteers in hospitals, someone commented that we should never ask someone to care for the unwell for free. I respectfully disagree.

Service matters. We should value the contribution that people make when they give their time for free in the service of others and we should create many more opportunities for it to happen.

Philip Colligan is deputy chief executive and executive director for the Innovation Lab at Nesta