Sacrifice, optional and about other people
There’s been quite a lot of discussion over the last couple of weeks about the decision to allow BTCV and the Wildlife Trust to run a programme of volunteering for young people in London to regain their free travel passes.
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone introduced a radical scheme that allowed every young person under 16 the right to free transport on the capital’s buses. It was widely heralded as a positive step in order to tackle social exclusion, on the simple premise that if young people couldn’t get to places they couldn’t participate.
Young people who’ve caused anti-social behaviour, and other offences, have had their passes taken away (which in itself has led to discussions about whether that is the correct punishment). In order to get them back, they need to undertake a period of volunteering with the above charities, as outlined last week.
It’s just another example of the increasing stretching of the term volunteering, particularly by government, to fit a whole host of programmes and projects. I may be a volunteering purist, but I get worried that too many initiatives are muddling volunteering with participation, work experience or community service.
Volunteering obviously comes from the word “voluntary”, which means optional. If you are asked to make a voluntary contribution, you can decide not to give. If you are asked to volunteer some information about yourself, you can choose not to. All this makes a mockery of both the government and opposition proposals for compulsory volunteering.
But volunteering isn’t just about making a choice to do something. My favourite definition of volunteering is “philanthropy of your time”. The great 19th-century philanthropists (and today’s philanthropists) didn’t donate their money for personal gain, but because they believed in the greater good. The libraries, art galleries, hospitals and trusts that enriched public life in this country came about because those people understood the basic principles of social return on investment.
And that’s why some schemes appear to be betraying the concept of volunteering on two related fronts. Firstly, whilst I’d never deny the right of volunteers to use their volunteering to develop skills and gain experience, nor that people should be stopped from volunteering because they want to improve their CV, I get particularly worried when volunteering is promoted as primarily about skills development and increasing job prospects. Hospital radio has always been the way budding DJs got to practice their ‘art’, but certainly at my hospital radio station it was always made clear that you were there to serve the patients; the skills you developed were a by-product. Volunteering is not simply about personal gain.
Which is my second point – volunteering is about doing something that makes a positive difference for someone else (or at least something else, in the case of environmental volunteering). That’s why I get a bit nervous by things like the National Talent Bank that appear to be about promoting volunteering without a single mention that volunteering is a means to an end; not the end in itself. Even v appears to be about counting the number of volunteers placed rather than the effect those volunteers can have.
And if I could have a third point, it would be that volunteering has to involve a sacrifice. I’m all for new ways of volunteering, including current thoughts around micro-volunteering, but I’d get slightly worried if you could count yourself as a volunteer because you had re-tweeted a message on Twitter. That’s akin to counting yourself a philanthropist because you dropped your 1p of spare change into a collecting tin.
Does this matter? Well, I think so. Five or so years ago, before the current rush to push volunteering, lots of people (including young people) engaged in positive volunteering opportunities because they believed in the cause and wanted to make a difference. I certainly don’t want to rubbish the new initiatives that have tried to engage new people into volunteering, but we need to be careful we don’t lose or de-value that level of volunteering, or muddle good citizenship (participation) with the extra effort required for an activity to be counted as volunteering. Because, if a young person who helps run a Brownie night every week is compared equally with a young person who once spent an afternoon in a recording studio making a music track, we’re in danger of losing the real value of volunteering. And that is the effect it has on others.
So what do I think should have been done to give back travel passes to young people? Well, my suggestion would have been the creation of young people’s courts, to introduce the principle of being judged by peers. Part of what the “jury” would look at was what pro-social activities the young person had been involved in. That could include volunteering, but it wouldn’t make the direct connection between volunteering and returning the pass. And the jury should of course focus on the effect that the volunteering had.
Photo courtesy of Actions Speak Louder. Used under licence.
Tags:anti-social behaviour, btcv, ken livingstone, national talent bank, philanthropy, social return on investment, v, volunteering, wildlife trust
25. July 2009 at 5:18 pm :
Great post Olly. It’s been a hallmark of this Government now to link volunteering to all sorts of other agendas. Worth looking at what Obama is doing now too in the States e.g. linking volunteering to paying off costs of the studying.
Interesting to boil volunteering down to three elements i; voluntary ii; impact, and iii; sacrifice. I certainly agree with the first two, and impact particularly gets left off a lot of Govt sponsored volunteering initiatives as it’s notoriously difficult to measure. But I’d hesitate to insist on sacrifice as being a core ingredient to the volunteering experience.
I think the problem is essentially that sacrifice is a relative concept; what counts as sacrifice for one, is pleasure for another. Also reckon that the sacrifice thing is probably better captured by talking about commitment.
I do think that when you’re talking about impact (without any scientific basis to back me up here) I think someone’s volunteering experience really starts to make a significant impact once the volunteer becomes committed to what they’re doing.
And I think you’re way more likely to become committed if it’s a truly voluntary experience. If it’s not, once the pressure to volunteer is removed, so the volunteering is likely to end.
26. July 2009 at 10:41 am :
Hi Patrick,
I guess when I meant sacrifice I didn’t mean that they have a negative experience. I guess what I meant was they had to “give up” something for it. I love doing youth development residentials, but it involves me “giving up” my weekend.
Another way of looking at it is treating it as an investment (of time). Helping carry a buggy up some stairs isn’t volunteering – it’s good citizenship – because I was going that way anyway. Potentially I could have been where I wanted to be 30 seconds earlier but it’s hardly going to impact on my day. But spending three hours a week answering a helpline is a substantial investment of my time; that I could have been doing other things with.
Perhaps sacrifice wasn’t the right word; maybe commitment is better!
Olly
28. July 2009 at 11:18 am :
Hi Olly.
Thanks for this post – it made me think. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday (not all the time, obviously).
I think it’s really important to value volunteers and the amazing stuff they do, and the impact they have on their communities. That’s why v built on the success of MV with the vinspired awards, which record not only the hours that young volunteers do, but also the impact they have on their communities, as well as the skills they use. No-one sending a text message would qualify for this kind of recognition, and I don’t think anyone would argue with that.
But personally, I think volunteers themselves forget the reasons why they started volunteering, and get quite judgemental about new volunteers’ motivations.
It’s something that crops up quite a lot in working with young volunteers, and I noticed it when I sat in one of the research groups for the v/YouthNet research we did earlier this year. I listened to a girl who volunteers quite a lot dismissing her first forays into volunteering as not really volunteering because she was motivated by a desire to get work experience for her CV.
When surely, the point is that first experience of volunteering was a huge step for her in terms of overcoming the kind of barriers we hear time and time again – I don’t have anything to offer, It’s not for people like me, I don’t have time, I don’t know how to get into it. In being motivated for a specific purpose, she discovered a whole new world, where she could make a difference – she knew she could because she had done so. And she continues to do so to this day.
I didn’t volunteer until I was 23. Before then, I would have been far to intimidated to approach a charity and offer my services. Not because I didn’t care – I did, and was always signing petitions and so on – but because I really didn’t have the confidence in myself to think I could make a difference to the huge problems I saw in the world. I thought the people who did volunteers were different, special, better, nicer people than me. In the end, volunteering fell into my lap – someone knew I had a background in journalism and asked for my help.
This is what we are trying to replicate through initiatives like Favour Farm. We’re not saying making someone a cup of tea is volunteering. But we are encouraging people to feel good about making other people happy, and in doing so, creating a way for us to be able to suggest volunteering opportunities to people who otherwise wouldn’t get round to seeking them out.
I think the micro-volunteering example you cite is really amazing in terms of helping people to see that they can make a difference when people all work together. And it’s that faith you need if you’re going to try and take on the world’s biggest problems, like climate change and hunger and war.
Sometimes the most impactful volunteers need help to move from participation to volunteering. I see this at Body & Soul, a charity I volunteered for, and which now hosts a v match fund project. I see young people whose lives are torn apart by HIV diagnosis being transformed, first by participating, then by using their unique experience to support others in their situation, or speaking out about the reality of living with HIV to hundreds of people. They started off seeking help, but that experience is exactly what makes them best placed to help others.
So yes, it’s sometimes a bit fuzzy to find the line between participation and volunteering – at exactly what point does one start and the other stop? But I’d rather blur definitions than exclude people.
Sorry, this is possibly the longest blog comment in the world ever!
Thanks for making me think about this.
Hannah
28. July 2009 at 9:51 pm :
Hi Hannah,
Thanks for your considered post and raising some good issues.
I certainly wasn’t advocating excluding young people from participating in any activity on the basis that I didn’t think it was “proper” volunteering. My mirth was more aimed towards the Government, and associated bodies, that appear to be using the term ‘volunteering’ to mean a range of things that aren’t volunteering. That doesn’t mean these activities aren’t valid, or important, or shouldn’t be encouraged; but there are separate terms for them because they are different. And I believe we need to ensure the distinction remains, not because I’m a word-pedant, but because I don’t want to lose the real point of volunteering.
I totally get where you are coming from about young people not necessarily volunteering because of altruistic means. That’s certainly not a problem, as I said it my original post I started at hospital radio because I’d grown out of being a bedroom DJ; it wasn’t my intention to get involved because I had a desperate desire to serve the patients on Shuttleworth, Pilgrim etc wards at Bedford General. But in my induction it was made clear why the station existed, and who it was there to serve. And that success wasn’t based on the number of DJs who ended up on the local commercial station.
I like stuff like Favour Farm because it encourages good citizenship, and good citizenship undoubtedly increases participation and volunteering. Equally, we used to have long conversations at SJA about when young people crossed from being benefactors to providers/volunteers; and came to the very reasonable conclusion that a lot of the time they could be both.
At SJA they still make the distinction between ‘service’ hours and ‘training’ hours. And people used to get obsessed with whether something was service or training: my view was that if it was that unclear it should just be counted as service. I’m not bothered about individual did they/didn’t they volunteer. But what does bother me is the way volunteering is being heralded as the answer to all our economic / social-exclusion woes with little regard for what volunteering actually is. And, as I said originally, my worry is that if volunteering continues to be promoted as a quick-fix for graduates without jobs, or to occupy and re-skill unemployed people, or a compulsory requirement for every young person; it misses the real point (and value to society) of volunteering: the effect has on others.
Olly
2. November 2009 at 9:13 pm :
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