About volunteering

This reflection is based on my experience of volunteering at various times during my life, and especially during the last 12 years.

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1. Volunteering is a response to a need.

An organisation with work that needs doing will try to recruit the right number of volunteers to do it.

The amount of need determines the level of demand for volunteers.

2. Need is not determined by the number of people wishing to be needed.

An organisation which recruits volunteers without having needs to match them to is not a genuine volunteer organisation.

Unless of course there is an expectation that the needs will materialise before the volunteers' start date. In that case one would expect that the organisation has contacts and information which provide a realistic estimate of how many volunteers will be needed. Recruitment would be up to that number.

3. In 1. above, if it is found at some point that volunteers cannot be placed, the effort has been successful and there is no more need for volunteer work. Recruiting stops.

In 2 above, if volunteers cannot be placed, the principle that need is not determined by the number of people wishing to be needed has been demonstrated.

4. Volunteers should not compete with paid workers for jobs. Typically the need for volunteers occurs in specific and well defined contexts where there is not money for paid workers in sufficient numbers – conservation, support for the underprivileged and the old, rescue, research and archaeology are just a few examples.

If the work offered to volunteers by an organisation is conventional work (coffee shop or harvesting for example) it may displace paid workers (local or otherwise), be financially advantageous to an employer, and would be exploitation.

5. As they do not ask for payment, volunteers should feel the satisfaction of having done something constructive and worthwhile with their time. This is especially so where volunteers have had to spend some of their own money in order to work for free – travel costs to and from a project, for instance. They should feel their time and money have been well used.

If the work is token, just to keep people occupied, it is not volunteering, it is a pretext. Volunteers are likely to be disappointed and feel their time and money have been abused. It has to be said though that some may not be disappointed: they may relish the low level of work and spend their time enjoying the attractions of the places they have been brought to. However it is still a pretext – in this case with collusion.

In these cases, if payment has been made to an organisation by the volunteers for arranging things, that organisation is a travel agency by another name.

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The situation is not always simple.

Government departments, national parks, large charities and the like have the funds and expertise to support volunteers with accommodation, food, logistics and training; they have the facilities to advertise, select and recruit. Smaller charities or communities may well not have any of this.

There is help for them though. There are fund holders – charitable trusts and the EU for example – who are willing to supply funds and support in deserving cases.

Getting backing from these fundholding bodies is not easy. There's the paperwork, the fulfilment of the fundholder's particular requirements, finding the right fundholder etc. etc. This is where the middlemen come in.

These are organisations which are not part of any fundholding body, and do not have projects. They exist to provide a service for people wanting to volunteer and for those needing to find volunteers. Projects wishing to recruit apply to them for volunteers. They find the volunteers and source the necessary finances from the relevant fundholding body. Some of them will support, accommodate and transport the volunteers if necessary. This can be, and often is, a good service. Such organisations have the know-how to work through application procedures, deal with insurance and legal matters and arrange transport etc.

But it can also be a scam opportunity. The arrangement works well if the point made in 2. above is observed, that recruiting is matched to a realistic promise of need. If not, and recruitment is speculative, then the recruiting body may be faced with having to place un-needed volunteers who have arrived expecting to be set to work on something worthwhile. This is where there is a danger of token work and unfair competition against paid employees.

This is not a competent way of doing business, but no-one is benefiting, so where is the possibility of a scam? All monies paid out by fundholders have to be accounted for and the volunteer placement agencies cannot be for profit. But such bodies need staff: legal experts, secretarial staff, people skilled in the application process, drivers and leaders perhaps; they need an office; they need cars; they may buy provisions. Expenses need to be paid. And so on – it's not difficult to see how such things can be exploited for personal, family and friends' benefit: who gets the jobs and at what salaries and hours? What sort of cars, who gets them and how specific are the controls on their use? And so on.

Then there is the practice of making volunteers pay a fee to register, and having done so, pay again for 'extras'. There are cases where clients who are supplied with volunteers are required to feed them or pay for their food – when such costs have already been covered by the fundholder.

One's friends and relatives can be provided with free holidays as spurious volunteers.

This scope for milking the fundholders and the volunteers is obviously proportional to the number of volunteers passing through the agency's hands. So there is an incentive to recruit as many as possible, without regard for the actual need for them.

All this is dangerous for the cause of volunteering. The people who are paying for it through their taxes and donations can become cynical. Volunteering will get a bad name, being regarded as just a means for getting a cheap holiday for pretended work and for riding a gravy train. 

In places where agencies have previously sent poorly prepared volunteers, have taken money from clients, or have displaced people from paid employment, volunteers from reputable organisations are in danger of being treated with disrespect by people who have no way of knowing that they are different. This is a bad experience for people who have acted from the best of motives. They find themselves in an atmosphere poisoned by the disreputable agencies.

It is my personal view that middlemen agencies should not exist at all, that funding bodies should have their own departments to deal with allocations and that applications should be made direct to them or through some sort of clearing house system. 

If this is not possible then there needs to be much more rigorous scrutiny.  The application process for recognition and accreditation by fundholders should be much more rigorous. Paper check box systems with sentences that contain things like 'must show evidence that...' or 'should provide...' are a gift to an expert in the dark art of making applications. Closer attention should be paid to the experience of the volunteers with inspection of the agencies' work in the field. Agencies should have to back up their recruitment targets by showing hard evidence of expected need, and there should be transparency about who the volunteering is for.