Trends and Issues

An important international event on the global volunteering agenda kicked off 2011: the 21st World Volunteering Conference in January, sponsored by the International Association for Volunteer Effort (IAVE) and hosted in Singapore. The conference marked 10 years since the world celebrated the United Nations’ International Year of Volunteers (IYV), so the UN is calling the 10th anniversary “IYV+10.” The Singapore event explored the changes that have occurred over the past decade and looked ahead at new trends.

As always, e-Volunteerism hit the ground running at the conference, covering the event. In this Voices, e-Volunteerism staffer Andy Fryar provides a photographic montage of some of the conference highlights and also shares his own thoughts on what he calls "the most well-run conference event I have ever had the opportunity to attend." Fryar also presents an audio interview from the conference with Laurence Lien, CEO of the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre in Singapore.

In work-oriented societies, it can be confusing when people do something for no remuneration when that ‘something’ appears to be neither part of their livelihood nor part of their leisure. In simplest terms, the question asked by the average person in such societies is: Why work if there is no money to be made or, at the very least, nothing to be paid in kind?

In this article, Robert A. Stebbins, a noted author and college professor who specializes in the sociology of work and leisure, argues that volunteers’ activities are leisure, and that volunteers do sometimes receive money, goods or services for their efforts. Granted, these benefits can seem inconsistent with the altruistic, selfless character of volunteering that is widely held to be its very essence. The goal of this article is to examine the subtleties that revolve around being paid in money or in kind to perform a volunteer role, and to examine when this happens, what form it takes and why it occurs.

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.

Volunteer manager Laura Hamilton knew there had to be a better way to manage and schedule volunteers at George House Trust, the largest HIV Social Care Charity in the North West of England. So when her organization began to review rota management software packages to help manage volunteer rotations, she stumbled upon a solution that surprised her: SurveyMonkey, an online tool for collecting data for volunteer surveys. "Whilst exploring how it worked," Hamilton writes, "it struck me that with a bit of tweaking, we could set up a form which, rather than collecting feedback or evaluation data, would allow people to tell us their availability and sign up for shifts."  In this e-Volunteerism feature, Hamilton reviews her experience with SurveyMonkey as a rota tool, and explains why "it really has changed my life!"