Volunteering in a voluntary community: Kibbutz members and voluntarism

The way in which kibbutz members define voluntarism, their attitudes toward it, the volunteering they do, their reasons for doing it, and the helping mechanisms and obstacles that the kibbutz offers were explored in a sample of four Israeli kibbutzim. This is a preliminary study of the way a unique society deals with a well-known field. Between-kibbutz differences were found mainly between the religious kibbutz and the others. No satisfactory explanations for between-person differences with regard to volunteering could be found, and it is hypothesised that the difference may lie in orientation to traditional kibbutz ideology. Our grateful thanks are given to Benjamin Gidron and our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also acknowledge the contribution of Nahum Goldshneider, Varda Rappaport, Yigal Nachtomi, Yishai Koom, Yoram Margai, Shoshana Cohen and Avi Ofir who participated in the data collection and provided welcome input to the research process.