Volunteerism today –
Does anyone really care?
Exclusive Interview with Linda L. Graff, August 27 2007
According to the most recent Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering & Participating (2004), the rate of volunteerism in Canada is 45% of adults over the age of 15 (or 11.8 million Canadians). It would appear that community engagement in the voluntary sector is thriving; however, leaders in the area of volunteerism recognize that shifting demographics and other trends may lead volunteerism down a steady path of decline over the coming decade.
Linda L. Graff is one of Canada’s leading authorities on volunteerism and she speaks candidly and passionately about current trends in volunteerism and the impact these trends may have on the voluntary sector – and on Canadian communities.
Volunteer Vancouver (VV): What is your definition of volunteerism in 2007?
Graff: One would think that the answer to that question would be obvious, and yet it is not simple or straight forward. We’ve had active, healthy volunteering in this country for decades but we are far from a consensus about what it actually is.
At its simplest, volunteering involves people willingly doing things for others without pay or other remuneration.
Volunteering can take many forms – short-term or ongoing, administrative and routine or sophisticated and demanding; it can involve swinging a hammer for a weekend, or travelling the world to offer emergency aid in disasters; it can mean organizing a blood drive that spins out benefits to thousands of people, or mentoring a youth in programs that change the lives of young people one by one.
However, what the field reports and the statistical data reveals is an increasing population of volunteers looking for shorter-term, more strategic engagements and not enough organizations responding to this shift.
VV: How would you describe this evolution of volunteering?
Graff: Volunteering is no doubt evolving, both in practice and in how it is understood. Some of the evolution is good. The range of interesting, exciting volunteer opportunities now available is positive. While it can take a bit of time to find exactly the “right” position at any given time, the wealth of opportunity is remarkable. Some organizations are trying to be more responsive to both the interests and limitations of contemporary volunteers, so volunteer opportunities are increasingly more attractive to a wider range of individuals and preferences. These are good developments in the field.
I think the other thing to note is that volunteering, while largely a grass-roots, from-the-ground- up phenomenon, can be affected, shaped and altered by other social, economic, and political factors. In many countries around the world, governments and community leaders are waking up to the importance of volunteering. Many governments around the world are pouring resources into the support and development of healthy, active volunteering.
In sharp contrast, we in Canada have virtually ignored volunteering. Volunteering has always been there and I think the general assumption is it will always be there for us in the future. As a matter of public policy, volunteering is non-existent. As a country, we pay it almost no attention. In fact, we in Canada pay the least attention to volunteering of almost all developed, Western countries and we are woefully behind the attention volunteering garners in many Asian countries. We don’t understand volunteering and we don’t support it.
This is the fact that I find most puzzling in my 25+ year career in this business. For something as vitally important as volunteering is in Canada, it remains nonexistent on the agendas of planners, politicians, and community leaders. While it remains invisible, the nature of volunteer participation is changing significantly. It is increasingly short-term, episodic, and project-oriented. People want their precious time to be meaningful and productive.
The long-term, administrative, and maintenance work is no longer attractive. Those volunteers who have given decades of service are aged and moving out of volunteering. Younger volunteers tend to look for volunteer work that meets their own needs as much as the needs of others or community. All of this means that many of the older or more traditional volunteer roles are increasingly difficult to fill. These shifts have serious implications for not-for-profits’ capacity to continue to meet their missions. Most not-for-profit organizations are either oblivious of, or ignoring, the problem.
VV: What evidence do we have that there is a weakening or decline in (traditional) volunteering?
Graff: We tend to think of volunteering as a stable, broad-based, sustainable resource. It is anything but. The greatest majority of volunteer work is now being done by a very small number. About 67% of all volunteer work is being performed by about 5% of the Canadian population. That’s a lot of responsibility resting on the shoulders of a very few. Anything that rocks that already narrow foundation could have profound affects.
Older volunteers who have been giving large numbers of hours are in a very small minority and their extended age will lead them away from volunteering over the next few years. There is no indication that younger volunteers will fill the gap. So, the number of hours volunteered each year will decline. Also, as I said earlier, volunteers don’t want to do the routine maintenance work any more. They’re looking for interesting, meaningful, short-term opportunities. Many will offer skills, expertise, knowledge and influence, which could be really beneficial, but it will tend to be in short bursts rather than extended commitments.
What I am particularly concerned about is the large population bulge of baby boomers who have, in the last two to three decades contributed quite a lot of volunteering. I suspect that as they approach retirement, they will drop out of regular volunteer engagements, seeking new opportunities that give them the flexibility they will want to enjoy their retirement years. And if organizations don’t start to offer many more interesting, high-level opportunities - consultancies and project work, for example - I’m afraid we will see baby boomers move away from volunteering in large numbers too.
Statistics Canada is predicting a slow, steady decline in volunteer participation rates across the country - somewhere in the vicinity of 1-3% per year, each year into the foreseeable future. That, taken over a decade, will compound the demographically-based attrition.
Ask any not-for-profit in your community. Almost all will report they are already short of volunteers and find it increasingly difficult to recruit for many of their existing positions.
VV: What are your recommendations for the leadership of Canada’s not-for-profit organizations?
Graff: We could turn this tide around if we understood what was at stake and made a commitment to design new, interesting volunteer jobs and promote volunteering as such.
Nancy Macduff, a US trainer and consultant in the field of volunteer program management, first coined the phrase “episodic volunteering” in 1990. That’s 17 years ago. We’re still trying to encourage not-for-profit organizations to get out of the mind set of regular, ongoing, routine volunteer positions and open up more short-term, project-oriented, consultancy-type opportunities for volunteers. Some of the resistance originates with managers of volunteers. Most of the delay I place with senior organizational management who don’t understand the potential and won’t give volunteering enough attention to learn what it has to offer. Volunteers should be solving organizational problems, not confined to little jobs that no one else wants to do. But a transition in the engagement of volunteers will require not-for-profits to rethink how they are using all of their human resources, and reorganize them in ways that maximize the potential of all.
We need to work diligently to shift the public perception of volunteering which centres on the notion of older ladies with bonnets and baskets administering to the poor and the orphaned. Well, that’s perhaps a little harsh, but the stereotypic image of volunteering is remarkably persistent. Even though hundreds of thousands of people – men and women, young and old - are engaged across Canada as sports coaches, search and rescue volunteers, international aid and disaster relief volunteers, and in advocacy, environmental activism, tutoring, event organizing, information technology and in any number of other volunteer opportunities, people still think of volunteers and volunteering as they were in the 1950s.
If we were to work at changing the image of volunteering and organizations were to open up more positions tailored to the modern volunteer—financial consultants, web site designers, marketers, human resource experts, to name a few—I believe the potential benefit to the community could be staggering.
What is the real crux of the problem? Most leaders in and out of the voluntary sector just don’t see volunteering as worth their attention. It is the ongoing ignorance about how important this resource is to our way of life that stands in the way of change.
And that is where I see the influence of funders being critical to this discussion. And note that I am concentrating on the influence of funders rather than their resources.
If funders were to understand the nature of the volunteer labour force and appreciate that volunteer involvement requires an injection of resources to be effective, safe and productive, then they would insist that organizations do more thoughtful planning around their program development. Funders would demand that organizations set out a full volunteer development plan as part of each project proposal. Organizations would be required to set out exactly what volunteers will and will not be asked to do along with a plan of how volunteers will be recruited, screened, placed, and supported.
If funders require it, organizations comply. That’s how it works – from the top down, always. I realized a few years ago that all of my ranting to managers of volunteers about these very same issues over the years in was making very little difference because managers of volunteers tend to be at the bottom of organizational hierarchies. Fundamental changes typically happen only from the top down. Since the top layer in not-for-profits continue to ignore both the looming problem of volunteer shortfalls and the repository of volunteer wealth potentially available, it seems to me we have to look further up the chain for a point of entry. I now believe that funders hold the key. The key role of funders in this picture is to exercise the influence they have to push not-for-profits to attend to the forces creating fundamental changes in volunteerism.
I believe if United Ways, community and private foundations, governments at all levels, and even corporate philanthropic leaders were to champion this cause and shift their funding requirements, they could not only influence how the sector thinks about volunteering, but they’d actually see a far greater return on their investments in the community.
VV: So this is an issue that is bigger than just volunteering?
Graff: That’s exactly right. We need to see this as more than a volunteering problem, although it is definitely that. More importantly, it is a community problem and a social problem, and its solutions lie not only in how not-for-profit organizations seek to engage volunteers in their work.
I believe the changes we will see in the next decade have the potential to seriously undermine what we now know as community life in this country. Service clubs and church attendance are on decline. Boards are having trouble replacing their members, and organizations in small towns and rural communities are already reporting volunteer deficits of a magnitude that threatens their continued existence.
When we understand that volunteering is vital to the health and education system, adult literacy, hospice, minor sports, arts and cultural events, religion, the environment, social service, mentoring, leadership, emergency services.... these are things that go well beyond the niceties of everyday life. Many of these services represent the foundation of our communities; some of them make the difference between life and death.
Our failure to understand how a decline in volunteering will be synonymous with a decline in caring is most disconcerting. The trends Paul and I discuss in the Canada Who Cares? Project have implications well beyond volunteering. As we become more isolated from our neighbours, disconnected from a sense of belonging, we cocoon. We spend more time in our cars, more time in front of computer screens, video games, and large screen TVs. None of these activities connect us with others or build connectedness in any way. The response to these changes must go far beyond volunteering. Simply recruiting more volunteers without shifting how we think about volunteering and without altering the architecture of volunteer programs in non-for-profits across the country will not accomplish what we need.
It seems trite, but long-term committed volunteering has been an important thread in the fabric of connected and caring communities, and its decline will undoubtedly change the nature of our society and I believe the character of Canadians.
About Linda L. Graff
Linda L. Graff is one of Canada’s leading authorities on volunteerism. Linda’s current collaboration with Paul Reed, professor in Carleton University’s Departments of Sociology/Anthropology and Law and Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research, has resulted in the Canada Who Cares? Project. The project website, www.canadawhocares.ca, includes a series of five “conversations” between Paul and Linda with observations from their respective fields and a discussion of what these trends might mean for the future of volunteering and the character of community life in Canada. The objective of the Canada Who Cares? Project is to create a buzz about trends in volunteering and to engage leaders across the country in community-based dialogue about what appropriate responses might look like.
About Volunteer Vancouver
The mission of Volunteer Vancouver is to inspire
& build leadership in the voluntary sector. This publication is intended to be a medium of communication and information for the many organizations active in the volunteer and not-for-profit sector. The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect official policy of the Board of Directors of Volunteer Vancouver.
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