Why Volunteer

Why Volunteer
Author: Mac B (AUSTRALIA)

Why Volunteer?

We tend to think of volunteering as an altruistic activity. We live in a world where we get paid to "work". Money for work is the visible reward for giving our time and effort. While in a career spanning 40-odd years of 7 hours a day, 5 days a week on the job, we can only imagine that volunteering to "work" for no money must be a major sacrifice. Who in their right mind would spend precious spare time working for someone else? Surely volunteering is altruism of a high order.

Having volunteered almost fulltime for the past 7 years, I've realised that the reasons people volunteer is as complex as society itself. While it is pleasing to be called altruistic, I know there is no one correct view of volunteering. By it's own definition, volunteering is a choice. People do not volunteer unless they feel some inner compulsion to do so. Without a compulsion to keep engaged, to freely give their time, surely 'volunteers' would simply walk away.

To understand why people choose to volunteer, a report for the NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care is instructive. Carried out by Heartbeat, an Australian company that analyses consumer trends, it identified four categories of retired volunteers and their fulfilment needs:

· Nurturers are volunteers who seek emotional connection and self-worth through nurturing others. Quite often, their work directly results in strengthening the social resilience of our community. Footy dads and ballet mums help grow our youngest population. Or, volunteers working through their local church to support the elderly and socially isolated contribute to the health and well-being of a vulnerable group in our community.

· Socialisers gain a sense of belonging through social interaction. Many people who have recently retired soon realise that a large part of their social community evaporates the day they leave work. Thus, volunteering in a team is the reward that is more important than the civic responsibilities discharge by removing of graffiti from public places, or planting trees is a despoiled environment. I worked with a 7 day volunteer who was a socially isolated alcoholic before he discovered the therapeutic value of working as a valued member of a back-office team for a large humanitarian agency.

Typically, this is as far as most people will venture in explaining why volunteering attracts their fellow citizens. However, the study goes on to identify another two more prosaic types of volunteers:

· Adventurers are volunteers seeking personal growth and challenges by developing new skills. I have witnessed an IT professional become a sleuth in salvaging old weather data (for climate change analysis), an accountant plan the delivery of humanitarian services to a vulnerable group in the community and a project manager turn her hand to literacy programs in jail. Often, these are activities that if these people had applied to do them as paid jobs, their c.v. would not have made the first cut.

· Workers seek self-worth through being useful and productive. Volunteering is a recognised route back to work for the long term unemployed. Often starting out as reluctant volunteers, they may be required to work as part of their pension obligations. In many cases, they soon experience the self esteem engendered by meaningful and structured activity. Stay at home parents also reach out to volunteer when the 'nest becomes empty'.

Beyond these four categories, there are other types of volunteers that fill out the complex tapestry of this unpaid workforce:

· Networkers build their contacts to support their career aspirations. This can include an upwardly mobile professional serving on a committee through to the underemployed providing blocks of time to do paid work for free. New migrants having difficulty being recognised for the skills they possess are a new class of networking volunteers. Stuck in a low a paid job beneath their qualifications (or indeed, unemployed after many job applications), they hope to establish their credentials by offering their skills for no cost.

· Affinity volunteers gladly give their time to get further involved in an activity they find enjoyable. For instance, volunteering at the V8 Supercar race attracts motoring enthusiasts some of whom would bend over backwards to be close to the premier car racing event in our city.

There are also Reform volunteers who undertake community reform campaigns typically aimed at moving governments and social groups to take action for a cause. There are even Power volunteers who want to directly influence the lives of others. This can be as benign as search and rescue volunteers saving the lives of their fellow citizens. Finally there are compulsory volunteers, a contradictory outgrowth of government policy that requires the unemployed to volunteer 15 hours per week to qualify for government payments.

Volunteers give their time for a wide variety of reasons, but one factor unites them. Stripped of the pay check, volunteers typically experience the positive value of work in their daily lives. The element of choice in volunteering eliminates the fog of the employer-employee relationship forced on us by a pay check. Volunteers enjoy their work or they would not be there..

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