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"Volunteer workers in community development"
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Making Volunteers
Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? InMaking Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach.
With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult \"plug-in\" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers.
Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations,Making Volunteersillustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.
eBook
Exploring the Role of Volunteer Organizations in Developing Italy's Community-Based Care Model
Introduction: Community-based healthcare models are crucial for reforming primary care delivery and integrating prevention, health promotion, and care services within communities. Volunteer organizations are increasingly recognized for their potential contributions; however, their integration within Italy’s emerging Community Health Center (CHC) model still needs to be explored. This study investigated the role of volunteer organizations in developing Italy’s CHC model by focusing on how these groups can enhance care coordination and community health outcomes. Methods: A qualitative descriptive approach was employed, combining semi-structured interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders, including CHC managers, primary care directors, social service providers, and volunteer organization representatives in the Piacenza area of Emilia Romagna. Data collection spanned July 2021 to March 2022, and thematic analysis was used to identify core themes related to the integration of volunteer organizations in CHCs. Results: The study identified four key areas where volunteer organizations contribute: (i) prevention and health promotion, (ii) identifying unmet needs and caregiver support, (iii) collaborative initiatives between CHCs and volunteers, and (iv) creating spaces for teamwork. Despite these contributions, challenges related to organizational coordination, limited operational specialization, and geographic disparities have been noted. Volunteer organizations were found to play a critical role in addressing gaps in community services, yet their involvement in CHC planning and execution varied across territories. Discussion: Although volunteer organizations have the potential to significantly enhance community-based care, their integration into Italy’s CHC model is hindered by limited coordination, funding constraints, and uneven involvement across regions. Strengthening partnerships, improving operational support, and creating dedicated collaboration spaces are essential to fully leveraging their contributions. Future research should explore strategies for enhancing the sustainability and scalability of volunteer-led initiatives within the CHC framework.
Journal Article
Social participation, altruism and learning opportunism: A phenomenography of adults' learning through workplace experiences in rural community volunteering
Workplace experiences are central to adults' learning and development, providing opportunities for significant and valuable lifelong learning. Research into adults' learning in volunteer work attests to its significance and value across the spectrum of adult learning, serving instrumental, social, and altruistic purposes for the learner and enriching lives through furnishing individual, collective and broader community benefits. But how does adults' learning through workplace experiences in community volunteering contribute to their agency and lifelong learning while also generating wider collective benefits? What are people learning, and what are the learning incentives, processes, mechanisms and affordances at play? This article reports selected findings from a phenomenographic investigation into a group of community volunteers' experiences of workplace learning in a social enterprise in an Australian rural town coming to grips with transitioning to life in a digital era. The findings illuminate the experience of community-based workplace learning from the adult learner's perspective, and specifically, learning embedded in social participation in rural community volunteering and associational life, providing new insights about adults' experience of learning through volunteering in the interests of understanding and furthering their own lifelong learning and development goals while contributing to their communities of interest, practice and place.
Journal Article
Social participation, altruism and learning opportunism : A phenomenography of adults' learning through workplace experiences in rural community volunteering
Workplace experiences are central to adults' learning and development, providing opportunities for significant and valuable lifelong learning. Research into adults' learning in volunteer work attests to its significance and value across the spectrum of adult learning, serving instrumental, social, and altruistic purposes for the learner and enriching lives through furnishing individual, collective and broader community benefits. But how does adults' learning through workplace experiences in community volunteering contribute to their agency and lifelong learning while also generating wider collective benefits? What are people learning, and what are the learning incentives, processes, mechanisms and affordances at play? This article reports selected findings from a phenomenographic investigation into a group of community volunteers' experiences of workplace learning in a social enterprise in an Australian rural town coming to grips with transitioning to life in a digital era. The findings illuminate the experience of community-based workplace learning from the adult learner's perspective, and specifically, learning embedded in social participation in rural community volunteering and associational life, providing new insights about adults' experience of learning through volunteering in the interests of understanding and furthering their own lifelong learning and development goals while contributing to their communities of interest, practice and place.
Journal Article
International nurses day: Facing challenges head on: Nursing through leadership and advocacy
On 12 May nurses around the globe will celebrate International Nurses Day.
This year celebrations will be extra special given the World Health Organization has designated 2020 as The Year of the Nurse and Midwife.
Journal Article
Facilitating Volunteer Community Engagement Service
Community engagement is an emerging form of pedagogy in nursing education that requires students and faculty to go beyond the traditional classroom setting to generate meaningful community-based experiences. Service-learning and volunteering are strategies nurse educators use for community service work. There is a gap in specific guidance for the faculty role in facilitating community-engaged volunteer service.
A case study describes collaboration between two faculty members and a community RN to develop volunteer service weekend trips requested by undergraduate nursing students. They shared responsibilities for planning and offering the trips through a co-facilitator role based on community engagement principles.
The trip facilitators' collaboration resulted in a positive and productive community volunteer service experience for undergraduate nursing students.
The community-engaged pedagogy provided a framework for building capacity between an academic and a community organization for student volunteer service. [J Nurs Educ. 2020;59(3):166-168.].
Journal Article
Who Provides Resilience to the Community Resilience Providers?
The article focuses on employees of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) as an essential component of community resilience. Forty women, professionals in the helping professions, were interviewed about their work experiences as employees in social service NPOs. The interviews were conducted from 2019 to 2020, mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand those employees’ perceptions of work conditions, contracting-out of social services, professional community and relationships with co-workers, work–life balance, job satisfaction, and their future plans. The findings present loneliness at work and lacking of a sense of community and a strong sense of mission while facing a challenging environment and work conditions in NPOs. In the discussion, we offer a complementary understanding of solidarity and resilience in NPOs—and we elaborate on the lack of professional “communitiness” and its possible harmful effect on the resilience of wider communities in times of crisis—when resilience is mostly needed. The paper presents NPOs employees as critical actors in producing resilience, hence there exists a need to examine their work environment, job perceptions, and the latter’s contribution to their own resilience.
Journal Article
The need for a complexity informed active citizenship education program
While active citizenship education programs are assumed to have positive benefits for the active citizenship practice of participants (UNESCO, 2009, p. 4), there is actually little evidence that programs do (de Weerd, Gemmeke, Rigter and van Riji, 2005, p. vii). This paper discusses a research project that aimed to determine and increase the impact of an active citizenship education program that incorporates education for sustainability principles.
The inquiry's findings showed that while the program developed in graduates the active citizenship characteristics desired by Australian governments, graduates encountered significant systemic blocking factors related to power relations when they attempted to put what they had learned during the program into practice. The findings also highlighted the risk of the program producing a cohort of 'expert citizens'.
To address these findings and improve the interactions and working relationships between program graduates, paid community workers and other community members, a new program has been developed that is informed by complexity and adult education planning theory.
This new program recognises active citizenship as a 'wicked' problem, takes a systemic innovation approach, incorporates a participatory budgeting process, and supports participants to pass on their skills and knowledge to other community members.
Journal Article
Community Volunteers in Japan
Volunteering is a recent and highly visible phenomenon in Japan, adopted as a meaningful social activity by millions of Japanese and covered widely in the Japanese media. This book, based on extensive original research, tells the stories of community volunteers who make social change through their everyday acts. It discusses their experiences in children's activities, the parent-teachers association, juvenile delinquency prevention campaigns, and care of the elderly. It explores their conflicts and their motivations, and argues that personal decisions to volunteer and acts of volunteering, besides being personal choices, are productive of larger discussions of the needs and directions of Japanese society.
Lynne Y. Nakano is an Associate Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. An anthropologist by training, her main areas of research include self-identity, gender, mass media and popular cultre. She is currently researching gender issues in Hong Kong and Japan.
Introduction Part 1: The Volunteers 1. The Life and Death of a Volunteer 2. Life Choices 3. Civic Leaders Part 2: The Programs 4. Cultivating Children 5. Preventing Juvenile Delinquency 6. Helping Others Conclusion
eBook