Volunteering as a Pathway

Volunteering has always inspired confidence, developed new skills, opened new horizons and experiences to those who have been involved. But today individuals volunteer with a greater focus on specific purposes that will assist them in their life’s journey. Hence, volunteering has become a pathway to success for many people, including:

• the unemployed who seek volunteer opportunities to re-skill and retrain themselves, also to build their confidence and update their current skills so that they can be more job-ready
• unemployed on mutual obligation use volunteering to fulfill their requirements so that they can continue to receive government funding and to look for paid employment.
• those undergoing some form of rehabilitation, volunteering provides a safe environment in which they can monitor their move towards independence and/or access to a new life style and new career choices.
• students view volunteer activity as an integral part of vocational guidance for career choice, study entry and completion of study requirements in many courses.
• those on special pensions view volunteering as an opportunity to contribute to society, to give meaning and direction and social contact to their lives. Volunteering is the pathway to social contact for them.
• Service Club members have always viewed their volunteer and community service activities as a way to network with other business leaders while fulfilling their specific groups service aims to assist others.
• High schools and award systems such as the “Duke of Edinburgh” require participants to have a volunteer service component for growth and development for young leaders. Volunteering for them is the pathway for leadership potential and growth.
• more and more young people are realising that for community awareness and networking amongst their peers, they need to become socially aware by being involved in a volunteer activity.

Volunteering works its magic upon people in many different ways. At different periods of peoples’ lives, volunteering can be used to access a particular career or personal need pathway. But in later life, these volunteers often return to community service, remembering positive experiences which have assisted them to achieve their personal aims, and wanting to pay society back through doing something voluntarily. So volunteering becomes a pathway to greater personal growth and fulfillment within their lives. Ultimately, the altruistic benefits of volunteering are felt even by those who have used volunteering for other pathways in their lives.

Research within Volunteering

The various definitions of volunteering, our understanding of the many reasons which motivate volunteers and the diversity of volunteering opportunities, complicate any possible research in the area and thus, the usefulness of the data.

There is logic in the argument that for the purposes of research ‘it is essential that the exact profile of volunteers be reported in each study if we are to avoid erroneous generalisations’ prompting some researchers to suggest that the use of a classification system will allow researchers to ‘account for contradictory findings …for specific unique groups.’ 10

While research into any aspect of volunteers and volunteering will require the development of operational definitions, and the comparison of such research will require clarity, it would be unfortunate if the not-for-profit arena became trapped by disputes on terminology. ‘Volunteering research should move forward using a framework for defining both the dimensions being studied and the variables measured.’ 11

The 1995 ABS survey recorded only those volunteers working through an organisation. Some have suggested that ‘this is a gross misrepresentation which, due to the narrow definition of voluntarism, excludes a significant number of people doing important although ‘informal’ voluntary work. Voluntary work, as is traditionally understood in Australia is a part of the ‘English Colonial Inheritance’. In other parts of the world people do voluntary work but they simply do it, without attracting the label of being a ‘volunteer’. In Australia, there is much anecdotal evidence about volunteer work among immigrant communities. 12

Another consideration with regard to statistical data on volunteering is the suggestion that the overall supply of volunteers has not increased dramatically over the years, rather that those volunteers new to an organisation were often ‘transfers’ from another, and that the ‘expansion in services had often been facilitated not by increasing the total number of volunteers, but by involving existing ones in performing additional tasks. This has obvious implications for the potential over-commitment of existing volunteers…’ 13