The article analyzes the peculiarities of youth voluntary work when choosing and carrying out voluntary activities in foreign countries in the context of the field of social work. The sources of ...scientific information about the motivations for choosing volunteering, international volunteering activities and the social benefits created by volunteering have been examined. The internal and external motives that encourage volunteers to choose voluntary activities in foreign countries have been investigated, the social benefits of international volunteering have been clarified and the challenges of volunteers in international volunteering have been revealed. Research methods: a qualitative study was conducted in order to investigate youth international social work volunteering. Structured interview was used as a data collection method, qualitative content analysis method was used to process the research data. Research sample: 6 volunteers were interviewed during the research.
Skills-based volunteering programs sit at the intersection of corporate philanthropy and human resources (HR). These programs enable employees to volunteer their specialized skills to support ...non-profit organizations, while developing new skills along the way. While these programs are the fastest growing way that firms deliver on their corporate social responsibility strategy, the academic literature has all but ignored them. However, there is ample opportunity to build an understanding of skills-based volunteering from existing research that crosses the realms of employee volunteering and skills. This systematic literature review of 36 peer-reviewed articles forms the basis of this paper, where we provide a definition of skills-based volunteering, and offer a theoretical model to guide future HR research and practice on skills-based volunteering.
•We shine a spotlight on the intersection of skills and volunteering.•We define skills-based volunteering to guide future research.•We map the terrain of the features and outcomes of skills-based volunteering.•Giving versus gaining skills lead to different, counterintuitive outcomes.•This practice is a clear way for HR to contribute to CSR strategy.
Background. Studying motivation, value orientations and personal qualities of volunteers in the digital world is very relevant today. It is designed to promote the broader involvement of youth in ...social volunteer projects. Participation in volunteering projects satisfies the needs of the individual in self-actualization, and also develops maturity and social recognition. The Objective of the paper is to provide the reader with a theoretical analysis of volunteering as an event, in particular digital volunteering of today’s youth. Design. The major classifications of motives for participation in volunteering are analyzed. The features of semantic aspects of youth participation in volunteer activities are discussed. The phenomenon of digital volunteering as a contemporary aid event is considered. The types of digital volunteering activities are proposed. The main advantages and opportunities of digital volunteering are presented, in comparison with the traditional form of voluntary activity. Conclusion. The issues of psychological characteristics of a person choosing digital volunteering as a type of voluntary activity remain undisclosed. The prospect of empirical research should lie in the study of the moral and ethical values of youth involvement in digital volunteer work as citizenship and social responsibility.
There is a growing expectation that volunteers will have a greater role in disaster management in the future compared to the past. This is driven largely by a growing focus on building resilience to ...disasters. At the same time, the wider landscape of volunteering is fundamentally changing in the twenty-first century. This paper considers implications of this changing landscape for the resilience agenda in disaster management, with a focus on Australia. It first reviews major forces and trends impacting on disaster volunteering, highlighting four key developments: the growth of more diverse and episodic volunteering styles, the impact of new communications technology, greater private sector involvement and growing government expectations of and intervention in the voluntary sector. It then examines opportunities in this changing landscape for the Australian emergency management sector across five key strategic areas and provides examples of Australian responses to these opportunities to date. The five areas of focus are: developing more flexible volunteering strategies, harnessing spontaneous volunteering, building capacity to engage digital (and digitally enabled) volunteers, tapping into the growth of employee and skills-based volunteering and co-producing community-based disaster risk reduction. Although there have been considerable steps taken in Australia in some of these areas, overall there is still a long way to go before the sector can take full advantage of emerging opportunities. The paper thus concludes by identifying important research and practice gaps in this area.
Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical ...research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of knowledge on volunteering, thereby neglecting the clear problematic of “inequality in volunteering.” Compared to the guiding question of “participation,” the concept of “inequality” can generate a more variegated, critical, and change-oriented research agenda. With this special issue, we aim to build a “new research front” in the field of volunteering. In this introduction, we advance a novel research agenda structured around a multidimensional understanding of inequality, concomitantly delineating four central research programs focusing on (a) resources, (b) interactions, (c) governmentalities, and (d) epistemologies. We discuss the focus of these lines of research in greater detail with respect to inequality in volunteering, their main critique of dominant research on participation in volunteering, and key elements of the new research agenda.
A key question regarding the ongoing process of digitalization is whether it enables societies to overcome patterns of inequality or whether these patterns are fostered in the digital sphere. The ...article addresses this question for the case of online volunteering by examining the profiles of online and offline volunteers in terms of sociodemographics, resources, networks, and psychological engagement. We apply quantitative methods using a unique data set that provides comprehensive information on online volunteering. Our results suggest that two mechanisms are at work simultaneously: mobilization and reinforcement. The profile of “pure” online volunteers differs from the profile of “pure” offline volunteers (mobilization). Meanwhile, the hybrid type combining online and offline volunteering attracts individuals resembling offline (reinforcement) and online volunteers (mobilization). Thus, online volunteering seems to be both: a remedy for existing inequalities in volunteering and a way to reinforce existing patterns of social participation in increasingly digitized societies.
Volunteering by immigrants provides dual a contribution: To civil society, immigrant volunteers can add an untapped human and social capital, social diversity and multiculturalism; to the immigrant, ...volunteering offers cultural, economic, and social benefits in their integration efforts. Yet, we need a more multidimensional probing of the term ‘immigrant volunteering’, because the multiplicity of migration generations requires questioning who is an ‘immigrant’, and formal volunteering does not capture the full array of unpaid work done by immigrants, suggesting the need to consider informal volunteering. By comparing formal and informal volunteering behavior of three immigrant groups (second-generation, generation 1.5, first-generation), we reflect on several distinctions and overlooked dimensions that might better explain whether and why immigrants withhold their volunteering. Using the 2014 wave of the German Survey on Volunteering, our findings indicate variation on formal and informal volunteering between the migration groups: differences are greater in formal volunteering, but smaller when we consider informal volunteering. Citizenship status and language proficiency also play a role. Implications of these findings are discussed.
Russian universities in recent years are increasingly positioned as centers for the development of Russian regions. As part of their third mission, universities are beginning to be included in the ...socio-cultural development of the territories. In these processes, student social initiatives and sociocultural projects with their participation are playing an increasingly important role both for the students themselves and their self-realization, and for the Russian regions in the context of increasing their sustainability. The article was based on the materials of two studies: monitoring of the students of the Sverdlovsk region and a survey of the youth of the Sverdlovsk region, implemented in 2020. The authors explore the experience of social participation of university students in the Sverdlovsk region, their involvement in the practice of volunteering in the cultural sphere. The purpose of this article is to characterize the volunteer experience of students in the field of culture, to assess the potential of youth cultural volunteering in the context of solving urgent problems of universities as regional development centers. The authors record an increase in the proportion of students involved in volunteering on a regular basis, with a sufficiently large number of those who, after a one-time participation, are not ready to help in specific volunteer practices. The article deals with groups of students with and without experience of volunteering in the field of culture. The authors prove that students with experience in cultural volunteering are more interested in it and are really involved in the cultural life of their cities. The potential for the development of volunteer activity among a wider range of students lies in the increased interest of young people in major cultural events. The social participation of students in the eventful cultural agenda of cities and regions can increase the competencies of young professionals that are in demand, while it works to form the social responsibility of universities. The identified characteristics of the cultural volunteering of youth in the Sverdlovsk region are also inherent in other Russian regions.
Abstract Functional motivations are closely linked to important volunteer outcomes, yet more socio-political forms of civic participation (CP) besides volunteering are growing. There is little ...attention on the applicability of functional motivations to such CP, including in disasters. Using a critical realist grounded theory methodology, 39 in-depth interviews were conducted with Singapore residents who had engaged in a diverse range of CP before and during COVID-19. A key mechanism, fulfilling personal functions, was found to relate to functional motivations. Overlapping functions were found, but there are differences in how these functions were fulfilled depending on the form of CP. Perceived accessibility , the subjective mental state about one’s potential to engage, mediated the effectuation of motivations in actual engagement. COVID-19 contributed to emergent CP by increasing perceived accessibility . Participating citizens pre-COVID-19 made adaptations to maintain perceived accessibility to continue CP during the pandemic. These theoretical developments inform policy and research agenda in understanding and leveraging CP.
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