volunteer

Children cart dirt and debris away during a community clean-up day in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

Volunteers fit new windows at The Sumac Centre in Nottingham, UK

Volunteering is the practice of people working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain. Volunteering generally considered an altruistic activity, intended to promote good or improve human quality of life. People also volunteer to gain skills without requiring an employer's financial investment.

Volunteering takes many forms and is performed by a wide range of people. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work in, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others volunteer on an as-needed basis, such as in response to a natural disaster.

Benefits of volunteering

There are three major benefits of volunteering:

1. Economic benefits: activities undertaken by volunteers that would otherwise have to be funded by the state or by private capital, so volunteering adds to the overall economic output of a country and reduces the burden on government spending.
2. Social Benefits: volunteering helps to build more cohesive communities, fostering greater trust between citizens and developing norms of solidarity and reciprocity that are essential to stable communities.
3. Individual Career Benefits: graduates can meet people and gain work experience through volunteering, and, it helps school students for scholarships knowing well that the judges are impressed when a resume lists volunteer work.

Social capital

The social capital represented by volunteering plays a key role in economic regeneration. Where poverty is endemic to an area, poor communities lack friends and neighbors able to help. This, voluntary mutual aid or self-help is an important safety net. This model works well within a state because there is a national solidarity in times of adversity and more prosperous groups will usually make sacrifices for the benefit of those in need.

Skills-based volunteering

Skills-based volunteering refers to volunteering in which the volunteer is specifically trained in the area they are volunteering in. This is in contrast to traditional volunteering, where specific training is not required. The average hour of traditional volunteering is valued by the Independent Sector at between $18-20 an hour. Skills-based volunteerism is valued at $40-500 an hour depending on the market value of the time.^[1]

Micro-volunteering

Micro-volunteering is a new trend in the non-profit sector whereby volunteers help out in small, convenient ways which don't require the commitment of scheduled volunteering.^[2] Regular volunteering is to micro-volunteering as a full-time job is to a contract position. Micro-volunteering is not the same as virtual volunteering, which is done exclusively from a computer. The trend aims to capture the value of skills-based volunteering with the collaboration models of projects like Wikipedia and Open Source Software.^[3]

Virtual-volunteering

Virtual volunteering, also sometimes called as eVolunteering is a term describing a volunteer who completes tasks, in whole or in part, offsite from the organization being assisted, using the Internet and a home, school, telecenter or work computer. Virtual volunteering is also known as online volunteering, cyber service, telementoring, and teletutoring, and various other names. Virtual volunteering is similar to telecommuting, except that, instead of online employees who are paid, these are online volunteers who are not paid.

Politics

In almost all modern societies, the most basic of all values is people helping people and, in the process, helping themselves. But a tension can arise between volunteerism and the state-provided services, so most countries develop policies and enact legislation to clarify the roles and relationships among stakeholders and identify and allocate the necessary legal, social, administrative, and financial support. This is particularly necessary when some voluntary activities are seen as a challenge to the authority of the state, e.g. on 29 January 2001, President Bush cautioned that volunteer groups should supplement, not replace, the work of government agencies.^[4] Volunteerism that benefits the state but challenges paid counterparts raises the ire of labor unions representing the paid counterparts as in the case of volunteer fire departments, particularly in combination departments.

Difficulties in cross-national aid

Difficulties in this model of volunteering can arise when this is applied across national borders. A state sending volunteers to another state can be viewed as a breach of sovereignty and a lack of respect towards the national government of the proposed recipients. Thus, when states negotiate the offer and acceptance of aid, motivations become important, particularly if donors may postpone assistance or stop it altogether. Three types of conditionality have evolved:

1. Financial accountability: Transparency in the management of funding to ensure that what is done by the volunteers is properly targeted.
2. Policy reform: Requesting governments of developing countries adopt certain social, economic, or environmental policies, the most controversial relating to the privatization of services traditionally offered by the state.
3. Development objectives: Asking developing countries to adjust specific time-bound economic objectives

Some international volunteer organisations define their primary mission altruistically as fighting poverty and improving the living standards of people in the developing world, e.g. Voluntary Services Overseas has almost 2,000 skilled professionals working as volunteers to pass on their expertise to local people so that, when they return home, their skills remain. When these organisations work in partnership with governments, the results can be impressive. But when other organisations or individual First World governments support the work of volunteer groups, there can be questions as to whether their real motives are poverty alleviation or wealth creation for some of the poor or policies intended to benefit the donor states. This confusion exists because experience shows^[who?] that what is volunteered can distort the foreign and economic policy of the country receiving the aid. The economies of many low-income countries suffer from "industrialisation without prosperity" and "investment without growth". This arises because "development assistance" guides many Third World governments to pursue "development" policies that have been wasteful, ill-conceived, unproductive or even so positively destructive that they could not have been sustained without outside support.^[5]

Indeed, some of the offers of aid have distorted the general spirit of volunteerism, treating local voluntary action as “contributions in kind”, i.e. as conditions requiring local people to earn the right to donor “largesse” by modifying their behaviour. This can be seen as patronising and offensive to the recipients because the aid expressly serves the policy aims of the donors rather than the needs of the recipients.

The track record shows that making any aid conditional on policy reforms is often ineffective. Conditionality only works when there is a strong domestic commitment to reform and the recipient governments are democratic, i.e. they are accountable to their own electorates. Volunteer organisations and their funding donors should respect the governments of the countries they wish to help and build on the deep-rooted traditions of people to help one another, and thereby provide an important ingredient for social and democratic development.

Criticism

A growing body of literature examines the negative effects of volunteerism around the world. As early as the 1960s Ivan Illich offered an analysis of the role of American volunteers in Mexico in his speech entitled, "To Hell With Good Intentions". His concerns, along with critics such as Paulo Freire and Edward Said, revolve around the notion of altruism as an extension of Christian missionary ideology and the sense of responsibility/obligation driving the concept of noblesse oblige, first developed by the French aristocracy as a moral duty derived from their wealth. Simply stated, these both propose the extension of power and authority over indigenous cultures around the world. Recent critiques of volunteerism come from Westmier and Kahn (1996) and bell hooks (née Gloria Watkins) (2004). There is also growing concern about the effects of neoliberalism in the field of volunteerism, as witnessed by the increasing influence of corporations on the social programming of nonprofit community organisations, particularly through youth work.

See also

Sustainable development portal

• Amizade
• Avocation
• Gift economy
• Timur movement
• United We Serve
• Voluntarism (action)

References

External links

• Volunteer Management Resources for Directors of Volunteers in the Volunteerism World - Energize, Inc.
• Nonprofit Research Collection on Volunteerism Published on IssueLab
• BUENOS AIRES VOLUNTEER offers the opportunity to volunteer in a Social Organization, learn Spanish and experience the culture of Argentina Buenos Aires Volunteer