YouthNet blog
An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet
All | Events | Youth | Technology | Volunteering | YouthNet | Charity World
Friday Jul 17, 2009
Brave new world for volunteering
With the collaborative nature of a lot web tools that have developed over the last few years, such as commenting, discussion, messaging and social networking, etc., the line has started to blur between the ways in which people engage with all sorts of projects and services which aim to effect social change. For example, it's increasingly difficult to define where the role of an active community member ends and an officially recruited and trained volunteer begins.
It's a broad spectrum that now covers community members who regularly comment and engage with other community members right through to volunteers who run and help administer the online community itself. Given the plethora of avenues (commenting, messaging, etc) to collaborate and participate that hard structure of service deliverers and service users is breaking up.
With the falling away of a lot of the more traditional obstacles to involvement (time, location, privacy, resources, etc), so active participation is becoming a more seamless experience. This leads me to ask: does maintaining this distinction between volunteering and participation matter or should our perception of what volunteering is broaden?
Another change in the way people perceive volunteering and the not for profit sector in general is that causes and issues are coming to the fore, and the mechanism or root you take to engaging with the issue or cause you care about is not necessarily now the driver for why people get involved.
Good examples of this are the how groups come together around issues on social networking sites nowadays and it's not enough for big organisations to simply appeal for support without clearly identifying the cause or issue they are working to change. Twestival was a case in point where people came together around an issue not an organisation.
Developments on the web are taking this into account, such as web movements-dialogues like 4Change, Socialbrite and many, many others that put the issues before the mechanism for creating social change. In what ways will this change how volunteering is perceived once it becomes increasingly decoupled from a specific context, i.e. volunteering in a formal role with a traditionally constituted organisation?
Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 4:34 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
