Ethics

This past August 2018, Starbucks, the coffee giant, and the non-profit organization Points of Light launched a six-month pilot program that allows Starbucks employees to get their full pay check while volunteering at selected non-profits for half the work week. Before long, the Internet and Volunteer Program Manager list serves were buzzing about a topic that routinely rears its head in volunteer management circles. Namely, do Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs create positive, beneficial experiences for volunteers, or is paying someone to volunteer simply absurd?

In this Voices, author Allyson Drinnon hears from people on both sides of this debate, ranging from a volunteer program manager to a corporate representative familiar with the concept. That Starbucks’ Salted Caramel Mocha Frappucinno^® may never taste the same again.

Why do volunteers break the rules? This Research to Practice reviews an ethnographic study of an animal shelter where disruptive behavior by volunteers was a regular occurrence. This disruptive behavior was defined as “any behavior that either explicitly violated a rule or was identified by more than one staff member as disruptive” (Jacobs, 2017, 31). Researcher Molly Jacobs volunteered four days a week for a year at the shelter, keeping extensive notes of her observations and interactions. She also interviewed paid and unpaid workers. In her analysis, Jacobs was able to identify different ‘rule breaking’ categories and analyze why this occurred.

This Research to Practice review of this study provides an opportunity to think about these types of disruptions in your own volunteer context, and perhaps determine different ways to handle them.

Some years ago, Debbie Mason Talbot, a hospital-based manager of volunteer resources, and Ann M. Heesters, director of bioethics at the same institution, came together to discuss a series of cases that generated moral distress for their volunteers and for those who supported them. Though these cases arose in a hospital setting, it quickly became evident that Talbot and Heesters had uncovered themes that would be familiar whenever volunteers interacted with clients, patients, staff, or managers. Talbot and Heesters realized that what they soon called “boundary dilemmas” were not new or local issues, but perennial problems that could be addressed more easily once a common vocabulary was established to discuss the cases and the factors that made them ethically troubling.

In this e-Volunteerism feature, Talbot and Heesters use case studies to explore boundary-crossing situations and organizational responses to them, case studies that can be applied to volunteer situations in a myriad of settings. They also review a tool called FaCE-IT to help analyze boundary dilemmas in organizations and methods to deal with them. As the authors write, “Volunteers who are made aware of the language of boundaries are better equipped to identify potential dangers and to make informed decisions about ethically troubling dilemmas. They will be better prepared to distinguish helpful behaviors from those that have the potential to cause harm.”