Volunteering is at a crossroads

Committed volunteering, characteristic of the period from the 50s to around 2010, is declining. People feel they have less time, and in any case, they are less inclined today to make commitment and turn up regularly even if it’s to a cause in which they believe. Casual volunteering is on the rise.

Without committed volunteers, civil society organisations (CSOs) find themselves having to reduce deliveries to their beneficiaries. Volunteers are disinclined to commit, so volunteer skills and knowledge are reducing. And coincidentally management in all that it entails is now weakening. Inevitably CSO activity scope is then constrained, and their beneficiaries are less well served. For the future of their CSOs, managers must adapt to this new environment to survive.

Whilst it’s easy to blame societal and economic trends, we argue in Achieving with Volunteers that the real cause of today’s threats to CSOs is poor management.

Indeed, many CSO senior leaders believe that volunteer management is an anathema and hence management in those organisations has never been good. And with current trends, it’s likely only to worsen. We argue that to flourish in any volunteering environment, those in CSOs who strive to achieve results must embrace the science of management. To aid this, we give a strong framework in our book for building and managing volunteer-based organisations.

There are few good books on volunteering, but most are useful. Some, like Pearce[1], are old but give great theoretical background. Some, like Eliasoph[2], discuss the politics and political environment. Others like Rochester et al[3] set out the trends and discuss the big picture. And some like Jackson et al[4] give a kind of stand-offish discourse as if CSO boards, managers and volunteers are each on different planets. With Achieving with volunteers, we are unique in the topic. We say how management should be done from the trenches, starting with strategy and covering everything needed to deliver for beneficiaries. We speak directly to the manager of volunteers. We give both theory and practice on all aspects of management.

---

Pearce, J (1993) Volunteers: the organisational behaviour of unpaid workers, Routledge, London.
Eliasoph N (2013) The politics of volunteering, Polity Press, Cambridge UK.
Rochester C, Paine AE, Howlett S (2012) Volunteering and society in the 21st century, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK.
Jackson R, Locke M, Hogg E, Lynch R (2019) The complete volunteer management handbook, Directory of Social Change, London, UK