United Kingdom

The Maasai Weekly Market

An innovative Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) project has taken place in rural Tanzania, involving UK-based project management company Buro Four and international development specialist MondoChallenge. In this feature article for e-Volunteerism, representatives from both organizations write about the special challenges and unique rewards of this project, which for the first time brought individual water harvesting systems and a community Internet center to residents of a rural Tanzanian Maasai village in 2008. 

In this Keyboard Roundtable, we’re casting a wide net to explore a number of volunteerism issues from the diverse perspectives of people involved in volunteering.  “From Whose Perspective?” will include a discussion of such important issues as:

• Employer-supported volunteering: Is it volunteering if people are paid to volunteer with time off from work? From whose perspective?
• Pro bono service: Is this volunteering?  From whose perspective?
• Do we draw the line on rewards/incentives in volunteering? From whose perspective?

We’ll engage a few corporate and community sector volunteer managers, a public sector volunteer manager and a volunteer to help us gain multiple perspectives in this next Keyboard Roundtable.

In this Research to Practice, we look at the latest survey of volunteering for England and Wales, with an emphasis on how volunteers view the organisation of volunteering. This survey, called Helping Out, looks once more at some questions from a 1997 survey. Some of the results may surprise you, but others will reinforce what we already know about the ways in which volunteers and prospective volunteers view how volunteering is managed.

In a recent report, The National Youth Agency in England explores the skills, knowledge and attitudinal development that young people derive from volunteering. The research did not intend to evaluate volunteering projects in terms of quality or volunteer management. Rather, the study focused on how youth benefited from volunteering, and what mattered most to them during the volunteer process. The researchers explored this issue in depth through 30 case studies and interviews with 215 young people. This Research to Practice reviews the key themes of this report, suggests how organizations can use the findings to promote the message of volunteering to the young, and discusses how the results can benefit and enhance the volunteering experiences for volunteers of all ages.

As the populations of most developed countries show an increasing
proportion of older people, debates have started about how an aging
population will be cared for.  For volunteering, this often means how
volunteers will be engaged to help care for the elderly.  But this assumption ignores two vital facts: one, that volunteering can help keep older people healthy; and two, that older people are active and a potential  source of more volunteers.

This report focuses on research designed to better understand volunteering among older people. It looks at the conditions under which older people become volunteers, their capacity to remain volunteers as they age, and the constraints that may cause them to restrict their volunteering. The report draws out implications for volunteer-involving organisations and policy makers.

This collaborative research project by Susan Baines, Mabel Lie, and Jane Wheelock was produced in 2006 as a collaborative research project by Age Concern Newcastle and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

2005 in the UK was the Year of the Volunteer, with a programme of events designed to increase the profile of volunteering. To build on its legacy, the England Volunteering Development Council, a high-level representative mechanism of volunteering, established The Commission for the Future of Volunteering to develop a long-term vision for volunteering in England. To inform this, a literature review was undertaken which aimed to look at what is going on in the world of volunteering, particularly examining societal changes and the impact these may have on volunteering.

The resulting report by Colin Rochester was published in December 2006 and is the focus of this Research to Practice review.

Debbie Usiskin, an experienced volunteer programme manager in London, shares her personal exploration of how government requirements to ‘check’ (screen) volunteers provide contradictory and conflicting responsibilities and messages.  She raises important questions about finding the right balance between protecting those who are served while supporting the widest range of volunteers.

Usiskin also introduces a provocative analysis of volunteer-involving organisations by influential business guru Charles Handy and applies his thinking to volunteer management.  

Research-to-Practice Editor Steven Howlett re-visits a paper by Colin Rochester published in Voluntary Action, the journal of the Institute for Volunteering Research in 1999, about the management implications for volunteer coordination based on the organisational setting in which it takes place. Rochester observed that organisational context will impact upon how volunteering is managed, but this context is not very well addressed in the research literature and, as a result, best practice writing often gives minimal advice about how practice can vary from organisation to organisation.

The paper argues that there have been two implicit assumptions in the literature which may explain why the organisational context of volunteering has received less attention. The first is that what is being measured and described as volunteering is seen to be essentially the same activity regardless of where it happens. Second is the tendency to view volunteering as part of the non-profit sector, where it is seen as primarily unpaid workers contributing to the goals of the organisation; the result of this is a dominance management language emphasising the ‘workplace model’ of management.

Note:  Thanks to the generous permission of the Institute for Volunteering Research, the full text of the original study is provided as a PDF accompanying this review.

This article was compiled with the help of several YouthNet staff members. Special thanks to Tom Green, Fiona Battle, and Lucja Wisniewska.

YouthNet, the first “exclusively online charity,” was started in the UK to be a trusted source of information for all young people, supporting and enabling them to make educated life choices, participate in society and achieve their ambitions. Every month over 350,000 young adults regularly visit and use YouthNet’s TheSite.org, packed with useful, unbiased information and advice that 16-24 year-olds can trust. YouthNet also created and runs do-it.org.uk, the National Volunteering Database, which enables more than 100,000 people a month to find volunteering opportunities UK-wide.

So who could be in a better position to survey young people’s attitudes about volunteering and find out what volunteer recruitment approaches work and don’t with this age group? This article presents the process and findings of YouthNet’s creative, upbeat methodology, as well as the new recruitment campaign that resulted. It also shares more general data from the wider survey of volunteering in the UK.