The Shape of Volunteering

Our first workshop for organisations wanting to improve their understanding of supported volunteering is less than a week away so it seems an appropriate time to start laying out the ground work for the discussions we hope to inspire on the day. To ensure that we’re all on the same page as the discussion moves forward we have planned quick series of posts to give a shape to what it means to develop Supported Volunteering. In this first post we touch on the basics of what we mean when we talk about volunteering.

Formal Distinctions

There are many national surveys and much research in the UK and abroad that seek to define volunteering (here are just a few links) but we’re going to try and start from a simple common sense approach and try not to get too caught up in these definitions – there will be plenty of time elsewhere to consider policy and funding agendas and the role they play.

Many of these efforts to capture the national, regional or local value of volunteering recognise two forms of volunteering - informal &formal - along with often referred to as civic participation which we will look past for our purposes at this stage. When speaking to groups of potential volunteer I tend to use the following (semi)fictional stories to explain the difference between two forms – this may seem overly simplistic to some who read this but this exercise will allow us to lay out the pieces necessary for the next stage of discussion.

We have two volunteers named I and F

Volunteer ‘I’ lives next door to an elderly couple who both have issues of mobility. Because of their circumstance it is not practical or even possible for them to mow their lawn and so I, with no expectations of reward and merely out of civil neighbourly-ness pops round- every other Saturday and with their mower and keeps the lawn tidy. This is informal volunteering – the person giving the benefit is doing so of their own initiative and there is no formal terms of arrangement between givee & giver and no one else is involved.

Volunteer ‘F’ also happens to live down the street from an elderly couple who have issues of mobility and, like the couple above, cannot maintain their lawn on their own. F decides that volunteering would be a good thing to pursue and makes themselves known to the local branch of Age Concern who, in turn, recruit F onto their Handyman Scheme which provides a basic in-house DIY service to older people in the local community.  The Handyman Scheme promptly informs F about the couple who live on their street and who needs help with the lawn. Volunteer F by the organisation and formal introduction between all parties is arranged. F then gives an undertaking to to provide a service (i.e. mow the lawn) on behalf of the Handyman Scheme every other Saturday. The scheme then keeps an eye on the relationship to ensure that the work is being completed to the satisfaction of the couple and that they are comfortable & happy with the whole affair. This is a case of formal volunteering as the volunteer is now channelling their contribution through a third party voluntary/public sector organisation – in this case, Handyman Scheme.

It is important to stress here that the C4V project is only concerned at this point with formal volunteering – and as such any general reference to ‘volunteering’ should be taken to mean ‘formal volunteering’. Informal volunteering though certainly of great value, is notoriously tricky to define and measure and as such is beyond our reach for now.

The stories above leave us with three basic element to our equation of volunteering that most people will recognise:

• the beneficiary – individual, group, community or environmental cause which benefits from efforts of volunteer(s)

• the volunteer-engaging organisation – thirds sector body who provide services/support to one or more beneficiary groups with the help of volunteers
• the volunteer - individual who works for the benefit of the others without pay or expectation of benefit beyond what might be gained from the experience.

Taking Shape

Together they form a process or relationship that might be visualised as in the image to the right. In this admittedly simplistic portrayal the volunteer originally exists outside of the the voluntary body while the beneficiary exists, as it were, within the organisation. The act of volunteering brings all three bodies together into a common space and it is the organisations role – and that of possible partner organisations – that we want to explore.

So having now given a shape to volunteering an obvious question for the next post might be where does the idea of a volunteer being supported come into play?