PDF format. Articles
Abstracts from Volume 7 Issue 3
Homeless people and volunteering
Kate Bowgett, OSW (interviews by Sharon Kirk)
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Volunteering is increasingly being viewed – not least by the UK government – as a route out of social exclusion, with the potential to help individuals build their self-confidence, form social networks and increase their employability. Yet so far, little has been done to look at how volunteering can be promoted to homeless people and at how they can be supported to find and keep voluntary opportunities. This article presents the findings of the first-ever research into homeless people’s experience of, and aspirations towards, volunteering. It looks at the attitudes of both volunteers and people who have never volunteered, and attempts to establish what homeless people want out of volunteering, whether they find volunteering to be beneficial, what barriers homeless people face and what they think are the most effective methods of supporting people to volunteer.
Summer on the island: episodic volunteering
Femida Handy, School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania and York University; Nadine Brodeur, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University; and Ram A. Cnaan, School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania
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In the fields of volunteer research and management, the phenomenon of episodic volunteering is growing in popularity. This study of volunteers at summer festivals in British Columbia, Canada, is the first empirical study of episodic volunteers. We find three distinct groups of such volunteers and define them as Long-term Committed Volunteers (LTV), Habitual Episodic Volunteers (HEV) and Genuine Episodic Volunteers (GEV). We examine the differences between these three groups of volunteers in their commitment to volunteering, their motivations, their interest in tangible rewards and their willingness to donate money. We find some significant differences, expected and unexpected, among the three groups. This leads us to rethink current beliefs about episodic volunteers and to suggest questions for future research as well as ideas for the management of volunteers.
The effects of volunteer job satisfaction on client perceptions of the service quality of a helping and caring charity
Roger Bennett, Centre for Research in Marketing, Department of Business and Service Sector Management, London Metropolitan University
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The clients of 91 ‘contact’ volunteers in the South East of England division of a large international helping and caring charity were questioned about their levels of satisfaction with the organisation’s services. It was hypothesised that client satisfaction was significantly influenced by the degrees of job satisfaction and organisational commitment reported by the 91 volunteers. The strength of the posited connection between volunteer job satisfaction and client satisfaction was assumed to vary with respect to three moderating variables, namely (i) the depth of a volunteer’s personal involvement with the good cause dealt with by the charity, (ii) the intensity of the client’s need for the organisation’s services, and (iii) the frequency of volunteer-client interactions. A model was developed on the basis of prior academic literature in relevant fields and tested on a dyadic data set collected from the 91 volunteers and 182 of their clients (two clients for each volunteer).
Professionalising the ‘do-gooders’: the deployment of volunteers in adult basic skills from 1970
Professor Yvonne Hillier, Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, City University, London
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The field of adult literacy in England has a long history, but has developed particularly during the last three decades. Throughout this history, voluntary organisations and volunteers have played an important role in the field. This article examines how volunteers have been deployed and professionally developed during this period, and identifies some of the tensions which exist between volunteers and professionals in the field. It draws upon a research project funded by the ESRC entitled Changing faces: a history of adult literacy, numeracy and ESOL 1970–2000, conducted between 2001 and 2004. A total of 200 interviews were undertaken with practitioners and adult learners, from four case-study regions in England. Documentary evidence and an archive of materials were collated and from this, a series of timelines were created which chart the development of Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL (ALNE), during the thirty-year period. The interview responses were analysed using Atlas-Ti, a software programme, and a number of themes have emerged from the data. The article discusses how these continue to be challenges for the field in the current Skills for Life strategy.
Reconsidering the paradoxes of cultural voluntarism in Greece at the threshold of the twenty-first century
Dr Yiannis Ioannides, Research Institute for Regional Development, Panteion University, Athens; Cultural Manager, Municipality of Moschato, Athens
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A debate has recently begun about civil society in Greece, accompanied by analyses of the extent of participation in voluntary organisations. His article looks at a specific field of voluntary activity – cultural voluntarism – that has developed in Greece during the last thirty years. After the fall of the military junta (1974), there was an explosion of voluntary cultural activities. The organisations responsible constituted a massive cultural movement, characterised by a high degree of voluntary participation. In spite of this, cultural development has in practice taken place under the aegis of the political parties. This ‘colonisation’ of the organisations promoting cultural voluntarism seems to have prevented a truly autonomous development. Also, during the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, voluntary organisations have been operating against a background of declining participation. Greek voluntarism has developed by building on the personal element in its organisational practices, and is characterised by a strong localism, activating a micro-level voluntarism.
