Are you currently volunteering in any placement or thinking of getting volunteer work somewhere? Why? Before it comes to the different reasons why people want to volunteer, in fact, around 22 million people across the whole world each year sign up to volunteer according to Volunteering England, and the estimated value of volunteer time has shot up throughout the past few years. It could not be made clearer that more and more people are willing to give up their time for free, contributing their skills and knowledge to help other individuals, give back to their community and promote a worthwhile activity.
It is the precious spirit of volunteering and the time and effort given freely that makes it so special and worthy. At the same time, being one of S5 high school students, whenever we ask people around us for advice what indeed is the best way to help us build up our CVs, volunteering—absolutely and immediately —comes on the top of the list. It doesn’t matter even if you have no idea what job you want to do, or which colleges and universities you want to apply, just do some volunteering work, gain more experiences and there you will be nearly halfway on your path towards future success.
This is no longer something new to us and we are all just too familiar with it. Volunteering is recommended to anyone by almost everyone, “it will do you good. ” According to UNV Mission Statement, ‘Volunteering brings benefits to both society at large and the individual volunteer. It makes important contributions, economically as well as socially. It contributes to a more cohesive society by building trust and reciprocity among citizens. ” However, whether you have noticed or not, in recent years volunteering have been held up and well-highlighted as being so beneficial that people are pushed, or rather —made to do it.
The Community Life Survey for 2013-2014 has revealed an important fact that approximately 1 in 3 unemployed people were engaging in formal voluntary work and this was actually even a higher proportion than people who were already employed. The survey is true for both genders, young and middle-aged, and it holds a key message: A large number of people with an expectation of employment might be working for free without any guarantee of getting an actual job at the end of their volunteering period.
Potentially there is a growing political and social pressure on volunteers from both inside and outside the voluntary sector. Due to the soaring percentage of the unemployed, many of today’s volunteers are people who desperately need a paid job and think volunteering as an essential tool to enhance their career chances. It’s time for us to question—why more and more unemployed people are “forced” to do unpaid work? The glorification and endorsement of volunteering from government and voluntary sector organizations could be argued as a major part of the reasons behind this trend.
The National Council for Voluntary Organizations published a report in 2014 where the benefits of volunteering for those looking for a job are repeatedly emphasised. The report mainly focuses on encouraging people to work for free in order to increase their chances of employment and how this process of “free labour” would be a great opportunity for the unemployed to gain confidence and save them from the frustration created by longterm unemployment. Surely volunteering will help them in such ways, but wouldn’t an actual paid job do far more than that?
Furthermore, there is also a strong political push to support volunteering, the government ministers and voluntary sector Chief Executives are particularly glad to talk about the importance of volunteering without utterly understand the real meaning of it and only use it to distract our attention from the huge slashed public funding. We need to be aware of the fundamental difference here, between the mandatory work schemes which have been introduced in recent years such as the Help to Work scheme and Workfare and volunteering.
These schemes were produced purely out of a very different intention which is just about taking up the slack and the attempt to save the funding as much as possible by replacing the paid workers inteers. As the established consultants in the business of volunteer management has said: “Increasing the number of volunteers in organizations will not solve all the problems we face in these challenging times, but it has to be a serious option.
Faced with two undesirable redundancy situations-letting all staff go and closing a service, or retaining a skeleton staff and increasing the number of volunteers- we would advocate the latter every time. ” And of course this is not just the case in UK. The 2014-2017 UN Volunteers Strategic Framework also highlights the power of volunteers on ‘supporting the achievement of internationally agreed goals’ without mentioning the facts that only people who have enough financial support may be able to do these longterm voluntary work.
So what about people who don’t have the money? Will they continue to volunteer? The cuts of public services raise a big concern about charities and businesses’ greater reliance on volunteers. The truth is that a lot of charities are too heavily rely on volunteers to deliver state subcontracted service that even proper jobs in the charity sector now are extremely rare. For example, a grassroots charity he Crown Centre, which is a lifeline for vulnerable people in the deprived area of Stonehouse in Plymouth, has merely 4 paid staffs and it could only manage to support those in need with the help of a strong band of 47 regular volunteers. Maria Mills, the centre’s project manager claims that without these volunteers the centre could not function at all. In addition, she estimates that 60 % of her working week is spent managing volunteers.