Giving Back and Staying Put: Volunteering as a Stabilizing Force in Relocation

Relocation in older adulthood has been shown to have health-related and environmental triggering factors. This study explores the relationship between volunteering in a community and relocation. Using data from the 2008 and 2010 Health and Retirement Study, which included 9,220 community-dwelling older individuals who were aged 65 years and older, our findings show that volunteering significantly reduces the likelihood of relocating out of the area, and such a relationship is partially mediated by having friends nearby. This study is innovative because it identifies a stabilizing mechanism important for understanding protective factors, such as volunteering, as a way communities can retain older adults.     

Caregiving and Volunteering Among Older People in Sweden—Prevalence and Profiles

This study examines the role of older people in Swedish society by exploring the prevalence of their informal caregiving and volunteering and by analyzing the profiles of these contributors of unpaid work. Data were collected by means of telephone interviews in a Swedish representative survey conducted in 2005. Our analysis reveals three distinct profiles of people involved in unpaid activities. One of these consists of those involved both in informal helpgiving and volunteering, a group that has been labeled “super helpers” or “doers” in earlier research. It is important for social policy planners to recognize these groups of older people and better understand the dynamics of their unpaid work in order to ascertain whether they might need support as providers and to enhance their well-being. There does not seem to be any simple contradiction between the parallel existence of a universal welfare model of the Swedish kind and an extensive civil society in which older people play important roles as active citizens.     

What Money Cannot Buy: The Distinctive and Multidimensional Impact of Volunteers

Although it is assumed that volunteers make an extremely important contribution to organizations and the community, studies that examine their direct impact are scarce. Using quantitative and qualitative data collected from clients, volunteers and staff at the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House, examined is the impact of volunteers on the organization, the clients and on themselves. Volunteers had a high direct and indirect impact on recipients, including on their attitudes toward volunteering and their future behavior. Volunteers gained intrinsic and extrinsic benefits and, as expected, their participation had a positive impact on the organization. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on social impact and volunteering.     

Multiple Ways of Coordinating Volunteers With Differing Styles of Service

Volunteerism is changing, and traditional ways of coordinating volunteers need re-examination in order for human service programs to survive. Our practitioner/academician team has been using well-known frameworks to reveal deep-seated assumptions about how people volunteer at the dawn of the 21st century and how changes in volunteering influence the organization and coordination of those efforts. The different styles of volunteering demand that coordinators' engagement strategies vary when different worldviews are held. In this article, four types of volunteer programs are identified: traditional, social change, serendipity, and entrepreneurial. Examples of each program type are provided, along with guidelines for their oversight. We conclude with a call for research that examines the important differences in how to appropriately use the talents of increasingly diverse types of volunteers in community practice.     

Virtual Volunteering: Online Volunteers Providing Assistance to Human Service Agencies

SUMMARY

A growing number of agencies involve volunteers via home or work computers and the Internet. The Virtual Volunteering Project [http://www.serviceleader.org/vv/] has researched and worked with more than 100 organizations involving online volunteers to document the benefits of online service for agencies, volunteers and audiences served, and to disseminate ways agencies can incorporate virtual volunteering into their organizations. This paper describes the Virtual Volunteering Project and summarizes data from a variety of sources that highlight the activities of agencies and volunteers engaged in virtual volunteering and the factors associated with success in virtual volunteering programs.     

A Regression Analysis of Motivations for Saudi University Male Student Volunteers

Abstract

As a major national asset for promoting social development, volunteer groups have grown rapidly worldwide and have brought significant benefits to individuals, communities, and society in general. Volunteering is encouraged and common among Muslims in the Middle East, but there is rare study on why they volunteer. This study used multiple regression to explore what motivates Saudi male university students to volunteer with a sample of 223 subjects. The results show that all predictor variables such as pro-social personality, values function, career function, social function, enhancement function, protective function, and learning function of volunteering, community identity, institutional facilitation, and Islamic cultural motivation, are statistically significantly correlated to students’ volunteering intentions, but these factors contribute to the ordinary least square regression model at different levels. Only career (B?=?0.217), social (B?=?0.212), learning (B?=?0.280), and enhancement functions (B?=?0.230) of volunteering have statistically significant influence on Saudi university male students’ volunteering intention. Findings highlight a need for a focus on instrumental needs of volunteers by government and NGOs. In regards to future research, gender and educational impacts on volunteers’ motive should be explored.     

The relevance of place and family stage for styles of community involvement

Community involvement may be a nuanced aspect of individuals' lives, and the place of residence could play a role. In this paper, we created a measure of four different styles of community involvement using cluster analysis, then investigated how education, work involvement, family stage (marriage and parenthood and age of the youngest child), gender, and the local residential community influence the style of involvement for a randomly sampled survey of residents in four upstate New York communities (N = 1006). The locally networked were involved through informal exchanges, and their friends were mostly family and neighbors; the institutionally embedded volunteered and made friends through organizations and work; moderates invested in formal institutions and local networks, and the loosely connected were minimally involved in local community life. Family stage, educational level, work involvement, and local community of residence helped predict styles of community involvement.     

Jobs,Wealth, or Place: The Faces of Community Economic Development

Summary

Multiple and conflicting practices characterize the field of community economic development. Much of the debate about these practices revolves around different understandings of the importance of jobs, wealth, and place. No overarching definition, typology, or theory, however, offers a plausible way to resolve these conflicts about community economic development goals, levers of change, and practices. One promising approach engages the complexity rather than trying to simplify it. Metaphors are multivalent images that call attention to crosscutting issues, underlying assumptions, and hidden connections. Metaphors enable a richer and more creative reading of neighborhoods and economies when used in planning and design. This article explores six metaphors with relevance for community economic development: plugging the leaks, brokering connections, asset management, building ladders and webs, creating level playing fields, and enhancing markets. How to support this complex version of community economic development challenges the ways in which we encourage innovation, investment, and learning.     

More is less? The volunteer stewardship framework and models

Scholars have devoted substantial attention to developing conditional models of volunteer administration and management, but no consensus surrounds the criteria underlying the different models or the rationale. The literature reveals a welter of possibilities but no clear choice. This study conceives the primary managerial challenges as securing access to and guiding volunteer energy into productive volunteering, and the volunteer administrator as the central actor in this process. Based on how volunteers are accessed and guided in their roles, we develop the Volunteer Stewardship Framework, which distinguishes volunteer administration according to two key dimensions: organizational access to volunteer energy (private resource vs. common pool) and guidance of volunteers (unitary vs. shared). Results of a survey of volunteer administration practitioners in the Netherlands show that respondents working under the four models emanating from the Framework recognize different elements of volunteer administration as “Very Important.”     

Pressures on the UK Voluntary Sport Sector

This paper uses research from two projects, conducted for Sport England and for the Central Council of Physical Recreation (CCPR), to analyze pressures on volunteers in sport in the United Kingdom (UK). Both research projects were contract research, conducted to inform policy and therefore were not designed to build on theoretical insights. However, from the results the research developed an understanding of the interrelated pressures on the voluntary sector in sport, which was informed by theory. This paper describes the pressures and relates them to previous research into volunteers. Contextualizing the issues faced by volunteers in sports organizations suggests several questions for further academic work, not only focussed on sports volunteers, but the voluntary sector in general. In particular, are the pressures experienced by the voluntary sector in UK sport common to sports volunteers in other countries, and to what extent are they also a reflection of general pressures on the voluntary sector?