Benefits of Volunteering

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.

The nonprofit sector has long been the domain of organizations and individuals interested in philanthropic activities and charitable work.  However, this is changing, as Corporate America discovers that nonprofits and employee-volunteering programs can be legitimate and useful business tools to promote their brand value.

The latest trend for companies is to create corporate nonprofit foundations and employee-volunteer programs to demonstrate corporate social responsibility (CSR).  Although having noble missions, the real intention of these corporate nonprofit foundations and inspired employee-volunteer efforts is to enhance brand value, increase overall company profitability, grow customer loyalty, and reflect company values in tangible ways. 

Two for-profit corporations, Bank of America and Toyota, are both enhancing their brand name through their respective nonprofit foundations and employee-volunteer programs, each of which helps Bank of America and Toyota to build stronger relations with their communities and stakeholders.

In this article, Kevin Kalra, himself a 2004 Toyota “Community Scholar,” explores what “brand value” is and how CSR furthers it.

It is often said that volunteering is a great way to test-drive a career.  But that premise is only as good as the opportunities we make available to volunteers.  And with an increasing number of thirty- and forty-somethings expressing disaffection with their present careers, it is no longer only young people who could use volunteering opportunities to help them change track. Fraser Dyer first outlines the factors that cause career disaffection in workers today and then looks at what agencies will need to think about to attract this potential source of volunteer recruits.  What does the not-for-profit sector have to offer career-changers anyway?  And is your volunteer program up to the job of becoming a shop window for the next generation of employees?

It seems counter-intuitive for most people working in volunteering that such participation should be bad for your health. A new research paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health claims just this, flying in the face of much other evidence. Is volunteering bad for you, or should we pay more attention to the way in which we involve volunteers and acknowledge that bad (or no) volunteer management may offset the positive impacts of volunteering? This Research-to-Practice looks at a new survey and asks whether it is volunteering or the organisation of volunteering that the authors found problematic.

Hong Kong has a long history of developing volunteer services. People from all walks of life are familiar with the concept of volunteerism while a wide variety of specific volunteer opportunities have been opening up, ranging from management roles to the execution of specific projects and tasks. The quality of volunteers and the sustainability of volunteer participation have become significant concerns within many volunteer organizations. It is expected that volunteers shall be well trained and equipped with adequate knowledge and appropriate skills to serve the needy. Further, it is believed that the enhancement of volunteer competencies and increased job satisfaction will lead to a higher commitment to volunteering.

The Agency for Volunteer Service (AVS) maintains a pool of over 10,000 volunteers and, in order to address some of these issues, established its Volunteer Training and Development Centre in 2003. A new initiative of the Centre is the “VQ Sustainable Training Scheme,“ promoting “Volunteer Quotient towards Volunteer Quality” – an attempt to provide progressive training to enhance the quality of AVS volunteers as well as to sustain their commitment to and aspiration of helping others.

This article provides an overview of what VQ is, how the training is structured, the three levels of achievement, who is being trained and who is doing the training, and other elements of the pilot project underway.