Articles

19th issue of Voluntary Action - Volume 7 Number 1

 

A different experience?
Personal experience volunteers at a cancer charity
Katherine Goddard, University of Roehampton

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This article proposes that ‘personal experience volunteers’ – those with personal experience of the problem they hope to address through their volunteering – are worthy of specialist attention. The article is based on research at a UK cancer charity, which involves volunteers with personal experience of cancer in the delivery of its services. The volunteers’ personal experience had a number of impacts on their volunteering experience: their sense of belonging to the community of those affected by cancer influences their motivation to volunteer and the benefits they receive from volunteering; changes to their personal experience over time have a knockon effect on their volunteering experience; and their personal experience results in some parallels between their volunteering and others’ involvement in self-help and mutual aid. These volunteers were also found to value a mixture of formal and informal approaches to volunteer management, rather than a purely formal, informal or ‘balanced’ approach.

Refugee women: from volunteers to employees
Frances Tomlinson and Umut Erel, Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University

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This article advocates volunteering as a means to integrate refugees and to give them experience that will help them overcome the barriers to employment. It draws on a recent study of refugee women’s volunteering. Refugee women participate in a wide range of voluntary activity, including ‘informal’ volunteering and work within refugee community organisations, refugee agencies and the wider voluntary sector. Volunteering represents an important means of social participation and contribution for refugee women, and can also serve as a meaningful alternative to paid employment. It can help refugee women to find work by giving them access to networks, information, advice and training, as well as by providing work experience and references. However, the transition into employment is rarely straightforward. Job opportunities in the voluntary and community sector are relatively limited, and refugees may still be disadvantaged in relation toother applicants. The article concludes by suggesting some ways in which organisations might reconsider their selection practices to ameliorate these disadvantages.

Community involvement in neighbourhood regeneration: who participates?
Paul Hickman and Julie Manning, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University

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The Labour government which came to power in the UK in 1997 has attached considerable importance to community participation and has sought to extend it in a number of areas, including education, health, housing and regeneration. It has introduced various initiatives in the regeneration field that have community participation at their core, perhaps the most noteworthy being the flagship area-based initiative, the New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme. Drawing on data gleaned from a survey of 19,500 NDC residents and using the statistical technique of logistic regression modelling, this article examines who participates in the activities of NDCs and highlights significant predictors of participation. These include a number of variables relating to the socio-demographic characteristics of residents and to the contested concept of social capital, including trust. The article concludes by identifying the key messages to emerge from the study for policy makers and practitioners.

Knowledge capture from trustees resigning their volunteer boards
Jenny Harrow, professor of voluntary sector management, and Sue Douthwaite, senior visiting research fellow, Centre for Charity Effectiveness, Cass Business School, City University, London

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The scholarly and practice literature exploring board volunteering emphasises recruitment and retention, while neglecting to consider the exit of board members. Yet the departure of volunteers has implications for organisational learning if the knowledge held by these volunteers is not retained. This article examines the exit of volunteers from boards from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Studies that represent volunteering as individualised, reflexive activity challenge those that explore the efforts of organisations to maximise their human capital. We report on a pilot study of twenty (predominantly UK-based)‘exiting’ trustees across a range of organisations. Trustees recorded the organisation’s failure to retain their learning – but also their own silence as they left the organisation. We offer a legitimisation of the ‘exit interview’ model for board members, and propose ways of increasing understanding of the board volunteer’s decision to leave and its implications for learning in organisations.

The role of higher education in the development of sports volunteers
Tiger de Souza, Volunteer Manager, England Netball

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This article summarises the key findings from a study of the role of higher education in developing sports volunteers. The research produced statistics on the number of volunteers supporting sport in higher education, and also enabled an assessment to be made of their characteristics and motivations to volunteer. The article examines the barriers to volunteering faced by students, goes on to analyse the impact of student volunteering on the local community and concludes with a discussion of whether investment in student sports volunteers today could make an impact on tomorrow’s generation of volunteers.