Participation, volunteering and the social web
Value of volunteering
Another way of looking at the discussion about whether volunteering is a means to an end or an end in itself, is to look at whether:
- volunteering has an intrinsic value, and so knowing whether a given activity is or isn’t volunteering is important;
- or, whether volunteering activities don’t have intrinsic value, and can only prove their worth in terms of their impact
Intrinsic value?
Is volunteering fundamentally good, i.e. its goodness is how we define whether it is volunteering or not? If it’s not fundamentally good, it’s not volunteering. Or can we only really talk about volunteering being good in terms of what it specifically aims to bring about or achieves?
Just as with giving, we can give in an effort to achieve a particular end, but we can also give for the sake of giving. There is an intrinsic value to giving.
Esoteric? Volunteering is a giving activity and as a result everyone fighting to promote and support volunteering wrestles with this question of how we value it.
Take my favourite counterpoint to volunteering: fundraising. Similar in the sense that it is also based on giving activities and different in the sense that its focus is on financial capital, not social capital.
Fundraising, is overwhelmingly seen as a means to an end. Although, I guess one exception might be almsgiving, where making donations comes close to being a good in itself. Fundraising as a ‘means to an end’, has no need to prove its intrinsic worth. It’s worth such as it is, is seen in terms of what it achieves and intends to achieve for the mission or cause it’s employed to support.
Volunteering’s merit is also dependent on the merit of the mission it supports, but beyond this, we seek to justify the value of volunteering in and of itself. At a minimum, it’s possible to imagine volunteering’s merit, regardless of what we think of the mission or cause the volunteering is supporting.
Lesser spotted mountain meerkats
A fictional example might be volunteering to save the lesser spotted mountain meerkat from extinction. Whether or not we believe in the merit of the cause or the actual impact on the fate of the mountain meerkat, volunteering in the name of mountain meerkat protection has value simply because it is volunteering.
Volunteering has value independent of its purported aim. Volunteering regardless of its aim has value in how it boosts a volunteer’s self-esteem, develops personal skills and builds social capital, amongst many other myriad well-documented benefits.
This is obviously not to argue that the value of volunteering is not increased even more when it can be demonstrated that it has an impact beyond those directly involved in the volunteering activity itself. But it is to argue that volunteering has value independent of its impact on its stated cause, unlike fundraising. Raising £50 for the mountain meerkat, which in fact does zilch in the way of protecting mountain meerkats has no value at all. Volunteering for the mountain meerkat, e.g. campaigning, educating or informing the general public, which in fact turns out to have zilch impact in protecting mountain meerkats still has a value as it taps into deeper social values that make us who we are, such as empowerment, education and community.
It should be noted that in this example we’re talking about simply raising the money, not how it is raised. Much fundraising is done through volunteering, so it’s important to distinguish between the value of volunteering to fundraise (and other activities that are typically associated with fundraising) which taps into the deeper social values mentioned above, and the value of raising money per se (a means to an end).
This brings us to the point about the form the volunteering takes. The value of volunteering in itself, does depend heavily on the nature of the activity. Different types of volunteering can certainly have varying levels of benefits to the volunteers and others connected with the volunteering, stopping short of the impact on the ultimate beneficiaries (in this case the mountain meerkats).
This is why the question of how you define volunteering is so hotly debated. The controversy is in the confusion between volunteering’s implicit value, independent of its explicit aim (e.g. to protect mountain meerkats). This confusion can lead to exploitation and manipulation of volunteers and beneficiaries. Why else would we care about whether something is volunteering or not? This is not a debate about semantics in other words.
An activity may help the mountain meerkats but may be detrimental to the volunteers themselves. For instance, those volunteering may be obligated to carry out an activity, it may be detrimental to their self esteem, it may be dividing local communities, it may be negatively affecting the volunteers personal development, and so on. When volunteering causes harm to those involved in the volunteering, it’s may be because of poor management, or it may be because what is described as volunteering, isn’t volunteering at all.
In this way, the debate about the value of giving activities can often appear to be a debate about the definition of volunteering. My point is that this debate continues to be as controversial as it is, because we’re all trying to work out how forms of volunteering are related to the underpinning values. It’s much more than simply trying to come up with a technical definition that covers all the bases.
Hold that thought for a moment.
Definitions
The issue of how we define volunteering is one of the hottest topics in volunteer management. Many are exhausted by the perennial question that never seems to go away: what is a volunteer? What is volunteering?
What other professions are faced with the same issue as volunteer managers whose very basis for existing is called into question every ten minutes?
Do fundraisers continually question the root definition of fundraising? It’s methods may be, but not its raison d’etre.
Do medical professionals spend as much energy questioning the definition of being a doctor? No. So, what’s going on with volunteer management?
If you’re not already well-versed in the arguments, Susan Ellis’s compilation of definitions of volunteering on Energize is a good place to get an overview on this debate.
General moral values and technical, practical descriptions
I think part of the issue with the definition debate is because we haven’t settled the broader point about context. There’s no consensus on where to situate volunteering on this route between objective technical descriptions and subjective moral values. We’re not sure whether it’s a generic term or a specialist term.
At it’s most generic, volunteering is built on a complex web of cultural and moral values, in much the same way as the concept of giving is. For example, volunteering can be a way of life, an approach to work or a philosophy.
At it’s most specialist, it’s a pay grade, a technical term with very practical descriptions. For example, you don’t receive money beyond out-of-pocket expenses, you do something of social benefit, etc.
On the whole, professions that succeed in establishing a consensus around a technical and objective definition, can go beyond the more general and subjective moral values underpinning it.
We can all agree on a technical definition of a doctor that goes beyond the broader values it’s built on. It’s the same with fundraising. There’s a technical defintion, that enjoys a consensus beyond the moral and ethical controversies that fundraising can invoke.
However, this is not the case with volunteering. Here there is no technical definition that has superceded the values volunteering is based on. This is because volunteering is as much a technical means to achieve a particular end, as it is about the values that volunteering is built on that make it an end in itself.
Volunteering: value-laden term
Take politics for example. Political parties have fundraisers, but not volunteer managers. Terrorists can fundraise, but if they call their recruits volunteers, we balk at that description because we can not distinguish between the values of what makes a volunteer a volunteer and the technical description of a volunteer. As Andy Fryar puts it in e-Volunteerism back in 2003:
While I have never been a fan of placing volunteering into a ‘box’ and labelling it in any specific way, the thought of suicide bombers being branded as volunteers was a stretch, even for my way of thinking.
In Northern Ireland similar discussion and argument has taken place about how the word volunteer is used. One example of this controversy was when the Commission for Victims and Survivors released a statement in 2008 which spoke of an “IRA volunteer” killed “on active service”. The Newsletter quoted William Frazer of FAIR:
Are they saying that IRA members were volunteers and therefore suggesting that in acting voluntarily they are somehow honourable and even of a higher standard than soldiers or policemen and women who took home a wage to stand in the face of these terrorists?
This quote demonstrates why volunteer is controversial- it is loaded with values- and can’t be used as a technical term. A comment on the website puts the alternative way of interpreting the word volunteer:
The term “volunteer” indicates only that they were in voluntary service. This means they were neither conscripts, enlistees bound to service for a term certain nor paid professionals.
Part of this discussion includes the context in which volunteer is a technical term: the military context. The fact that there are separate technical definitions of the word volunteer makes the issue that bit more complicated. Perhaps values are still brought into the picture because they are useful for helping to separate these different kinds of volunteering. The problem is that values are subjective, making it hard to build a consensus around a more technical definition. At the same time, volunteering is emotive, is inspiring and arouses passions because it’s values are so close to the surface.
Susan Ellis offers a technical distinction between volunteering in and out of a military context (“Not everything that’s voluntary is volunteering, particularly in a free society”).
Going further, there’s evidence that because volunteering involves a value-judgement, people are hesitant to describe what they do as volunteering. Interesting recent research (PDF) by Christine Reilly, Volunteer Development Scotland, “Something that others do”: applying personal experience to established definitions of volunteering“, suggests that people are reluctant to describe what they do as volunteering because they see it as ‘something others do’. They are often more likely to describe their own volunteering activity in more personal terms, less value laden terms, e.g. just helping out those around me. Here’s one quote cited by the research:
“I don’t have any experience of volunteering I don’t think. Maybe a group when I was twenty, but I wouldn’t have said it was volunteering, just something that I do”
Volunteering is seen as an incredibly weighty terms laden with different moral and cultural values (beyond the reach of many’s personal everyday experience). In other words, there is no clearly understood technical definition, that goes beyond the values we attach to volunteering and that make it what is.
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