Infrastructure

The United Nations is leading a worldwide effort to achieve clearly stated “Sustainable Development Goals.” Hundreds of organizations are selecting how they will contribute to the effort and, within that process, many are also determining where volunteers fit in. What are the essential elements of an environment that enables volunteerism? And what type of environment will ensure that volunteers make the greatest possible contribution to achieving sustainable development goals?

In this Voices, Bonnie Learmonth, James O'Brien, Shaleen Rakesh, and Goopy Parke Weaving identify and explore some of the environmental elements that contribute to the success of volunteers and the organisations that rely on volunteers to achieve their mission. These include contextual elements like how well people understand and recognise the impact of volunteerism; actor-based elements like the role of the state, civil society, and the private sector in enabling volunteering; relationships and power dynamics between actors; as well as system-wide factors like partnerships, technology, and funding.

The article draws on a discussion paper prepared by AVI (Australian Volunteers for International Development), VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), and the Volunteer Groups Alliance for this year’s IVCO (International Volunteer Cooperation Organisations) conference. Between them, VSO and AVI have over 100 years of experience in sending international volunteers. The paper includes case studies of volunteering in an emerging democracy, Myanmar, and of private sector partnership in India.

Over the last 10 years, a number of formerly thriving national Volunteer Centres in English-speaking countries have faltered, forced to find avenues of new funding or to merge with other organisations. But what about the fates of local and regional Volunteer Centres? How have they fared?

Using the development of volunteering infrastructure in Australia as a starting point, writer Annette Maher considers the pressures on Volunteer Centres everywhere – national, regional, and local. She considers their struggles to meet the needs of volunteers and their organizations, and to advocate for the field of volunteering in a world that is rapidly changing. In this feature story, Maher also examines such universal issues as the formalization of volunteering, professionalization of volunteer management, the benefits and dangers of government funding, and the need to collaborate. 

Cees M. van den Bos, a pioneer in the volunteering field in the Netherlands, recently discovered that there was very little academic research on the subject of volunteering infrastructure. So he set out to investigate the establishment, development, and functioning of local volunteering infrastructure since the 1970s in these eight countries: Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States.

In this special e-Volunteerism issue devoted to Volunteer Centers, van den Bos presents his research and findings on volunteering infrastructure, and shares his conclusion that Volunteer Centers should be defined as “agencies that have the mission to support volunteers, volunteer-involving organizations, and volunteering in general.” He specifically notes that Volunteer Centers are characterized by six functions: brokerage, the marketing of volunteering, the development of good practices, the development of volunteering opportunities, and the strategic development of volunteering.

Through his important research, van den Bos provides insights and findings that he argues are “relevant for makers of volunteering policies, for people working within the volunteering infrastructure, and for countries that aspire to establish a volunteering infrastructure.” And, he concludes, the “legitimacy of volunteering infrastructure cannot be considered outside the context of the increasing political recognition of civil society and civic engagement. Political interests in the concepts of civil society and civic engagement in the eight cases investigated has caused volunteering to be rediscovered and re-evaluated.”

For nearly two decades,the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies research group has conducted comparative research on volunteer work and the nonprofit sector. This year, in conjunction with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and in collaboration with the United Nations Volunteers and an international Technical Experts Group, the Johns Hopkins Center has published a Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. The Manual was developed “to help statistical agencies around the world track the amount, type and value of volunteer work in their countries” in a systematic, regular and comparative fashion.  Although national statistical agencies are its primary focus, the influential document also provides food for thought for measuring volunteer work at the organization level. This quarter’s Research to Practice presents highlights from this work.

In the spring of 2001, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) contracted the services of an external consulting firm to conduct a review of its volunteer program. The research had two key purposes. The first was to explore how CBS might improve both the involvement, and the management, of volunteer resources. The second was to summarize current and anticipated issues and trends in volunteerism and volunteer program management both in North America in general, and in other large Canadian health sector organizations. This article reports on the results of this review.