The aim of this study was to examine the compulsory volunteering experience under the Soviet regime and highlight specific reasons, which keep individuals away from getting involved in activities in ...voluntary organizations. The paper examines the factors, which keep individuals away from joining voluntary organizations, and examines what influence the experience of compulsory volunteering has. A qualitative research approach has been chosen. Respondents were individuals born between 1945 and 1965 and lived under the Soviet regime. 30 interviews were conducted with individuals who have not been involved in voluntary organizations.The results reveal the understanding of the concept of volunteering, the factors, which keep individuals away from volunteering, and what role the experience of compulsory volunteering has played. Voluntary organizations can use the results in order to encourage potential volunteers to join their voluntary organizations.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a huge wave of compassion. In particular, online volunteering platforms established channeling help for high-risk groups. It is unclear under which conditions ...volunteers were satisfied with their COVID-19 volunteering mediated by these platforms and whether they will continue their engagement after the crisis. Therefore, and considering personal susceptibility to COVID-19 infection, this study analyzes the effects of different platform support for volunteers and the fulfillment of volunteers’ motives. The study is based on an online survey of a sample of 565 volunteers who registered at and were placed by a Swiss online platform. Fulfillment of distinct volunteer motives and platform support drive COVID-19 volunteering satisfaction. Moreover, motive fulfillment and platform-related support indirectly impact willingness to volunteer long-term via volunteering satisfaction. Finally, the empirical results show that motive fulfillment and the effect of platform support are contingent on perceived susceptibility to infection.
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Developments in information and communication technologies have created a new type of voluntary activity called online volunteering, in which volunteers fulfill their duties from outside the ...workplace. Therefore, this study aims to identify and categorize online voluntary activities available to public libraries and information centers. This applied research was conducted using the survey method. Data collection was performed using observation and Delphi method. The participants in the Delphi survey rounds included 15 experts in the field of information and knowledge science (faculty members, library managers, and library sections' directors) who were interviewed in two rounds, and their opinions were used to conclude. The present study's findings suggest that 33 different voluntary activities can be performed as virtual volunteering in public libraries. These services can be divided into three general categories: content development, training/counseling, and promoting/informing. Among these, content development with 22 different activities has the most possibility of online volunteering activities, training/counseling with six activities, and promoting/informing with five activities are the following categories, respectively. In addition, for each of these three categories, relevant general competencies are presented separately, while for 33 voluntary activities, specialized goals and competencies are suggested by experts. Considering the variety of activities that public libraries can perform virtually through their volunteers, it seems necessary to identify the capacities and capabilities of libraries and volunteers so that the maximum efficiency of volunteers is achieved in reaching the library's goals. No study on identifying and categorizing voluntary activities in public libraries and information centers is available. While identifying and categorizing these activities, the present research mentions the goals for each activity and specifies general and specialized conditions for volunteers to perform the same activity.
This paper focuses on the phenomenon of pro-migrant volunteering in urban areas. Its objective is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon, which has recently undergone important ...reconsiderations. Indeed, scholars in migration studies have long contrasted activists in social and political movements with volunteers: the first were usually celebrated for the challenge posed to the status quo, whereas the latter looked down for engaging in a depoliticized form of civic action. Drawing from two research studies conducted between 2017 and 2022 in the Italian city of Milan, this paper shed light on the current processes of hybridization between pro-migrant volunteering and activism, and on the politicization affecting pro-migrant volunteering. Here, politics include instances of micro-politics, in which our way of thinking, behaving and imagining our society is transformed, even without triggering a revolution. To make this point, I presented a typology of volunteers and shed light on some important functions these actors play in the city of Milan vis-à-vis refugees. Underlining the strong interlinkages between these two ‘words’, I also stress the implications for the existing literature.
•Pro-migrant volunteers emerge as significant actors in local migration governance.•The paper explores the motivations, objectives, and peculiarities of these actors.•It draws from two research studies employing ethnographic fieldwork and interviews.•The paper presents a typology of pro-migrant volunteers.•It also discusses their impact on political decisions at the local level.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
26.
COVID-19 Volunteering Experience in Vietnam Lan, Tran Thi; Khanh, Vo Trong; Minh Duc, Nguyen Tran
International journal of medical students,
07/2021, Volume:
9, Issue:
3
Journal Article
This qualitative research study explores how a group of 27 British undergraduate students make meaning of their experiences as they prepare for, participate in, and reflect upon a short-term ...international volunteer excursion in Kenya. Through a thematic analysis of verbal and visual text (semi-structured interviews, field notes and photographic content posted to Facebook), I seek to understand the narrative claims young people come to make about this unique life episode. In particular, I examine how study participants take-up and employ notions of ‘authenticity’ within their personal travel narratives, and on what bases they claim to have encountered the ‘real Kenya.’ Here, I document the specific criteria participants drew upon to assert the value and legitimacy of their experience, including the remoteness of their destination, their engagement in ‘everyday’ Kenyan life, and their intimate interactions with local people. Next, I explore participants' attempts to differentiate themselves from 'other' volunteers - a grouping they referred to broadly (and derogatorily) as 'voluntourists.' Here, I detail the extent to which the critiques associated with international volunteering have become adopted into mainstream discourse, thereby helping to shape which identities (and particular labels) young travellers embrace and contest. Finally, I analyse the ways participants navigate difficult representational choices when communicating their international volunteer experiences to a public audience via social media. Revealing these practices is key to understanding young people’s impression management strategies and the types of ‘performances’ in which they may be invested. Overall, this thesis is positioned as a sociological inquiry, theoretically informed by the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman and the field of whiteness studies. I further situate findings within the context of late or liquid modernity.
Understanding volunteer motives is especially important today. This article describes five unique motivations to volunteer. Written by Kimberly Wiley, Chelsea DeMasters, Colin Dobbins, and Caroline ...Casola, and published by the UF/IFAS Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, May 2023.
This paper develops a multi-scalar geography of youth volunteering in Uganda. A growing body of research has explored the geographies of volunteering in the global North and international ...volunteering and development. However, despite the mainstreaming of volunteers as development actors, less attention has been paid to the unique local and national geographies of volunteering in global South settings. This paper explores how and why different ideas and practices of volunteering take shape and prominence in Uganda and how this impacts patterns of youth inclusion, inequality and opportunity. Analysing data on volunteering by young refugees in Uganda, we develop a multi-scalar geography to situate volunteering at the interface of ‘global’ volunteering policy and knowledges, aid and development architectures, youth unemployment, community institutions and local socio-economic inequalities. Through this, we reveal how programmed and audited forms of youth volunteering oriented to youth skills and employability are privileged. We show how this articulates with local inequalities to create uneven access to volunteering opportunities and practices. Through our approach, we show how a multi-scalar geography of volunteering enables us to build richer, more nuanced conceptualisations of volunteering in the global South that address the different ways global discourses, local histories, community organisations and social inequalities come together across space and time to produce uneven geographies of volunteering in particular places.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
This article investigates spontaneous volunteering during the social crisis referred to as the “European 2015 refugee crisis.” The situation was politically controversial and the vacuum in ...humanitarian aid was filled by civil society, including large numbers of spontaneous volunteers (SVs). Based on empirical research, we analyzed the responses and the experiences of SVs working under the auspices of civil society organizations and derived management implications. The findings show that the environment of spontaneous volunteering in social crises differs from that in natural disaster situations. SVs partly substitute official response systems and this results in a high degree of self-organization. Thus, “structured self-organization,” that is finding a suitable complementary relationship between self-organization and coordination, is crucial for the efficiency of SVs’ work, and their satisfaction, well-being, and commitment. Structured self-organization requires (a) fluid structures that enable autonomy, (b) orienting framework conditions, and (c) resources for care and coordination.
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