Classic and New Styles of Volunteering
By Lesley Hustinx
From Volunteering and the Test of Time, London: Institute for Volunteering Research, 2007, pp 63-7.
...[T]here is a growing conviction among practitioners that volunteering is undergoing a fundamental change, from the classic model of commitment to a completely new type.... Whereas Classic volunteering can generally be characterised as coherent and stable, the New type is rather unpredictable, fragmented and inconstant. Classic volunteering is inspired by collective identities and traditional roles, whereas New volunteering is a matter of personal preferences.
The culture of the volunteers
The culture of the Classic volunteer is strongly linked to social class, gender, religion or local community. These traditional cultural phenomena create fixed identities and coercive patterns of behaviour that affect volunteering.
New volunteers no longer identify with these fixed cultural frameworks. Individualisation means freedom of choice in all spheres of life, including voluntary action. Instead of an ideological system, personal preferences dictate whether a person volunteers and in what kind of work. New volunteers consciously consider all the options before choosing one particular kind of volunteer work.
The choice of organisation
The Classic volunteer chooses an organisation on the basis of strong cultural identification, often associated with religious beliefs and ideological convictions. As a result, this type of volunteer is very loyal and is willing to accept a hierarchical structure in which power lies with an autonomous leader or leaders.
New volunteers are loyal not to a particular organisation but to a particular cause. They choose an organisation because it offers them the kind of volunteering activities they are interested in. If their interests change, they may well change organisations also. Hence being a volunteer increasingly resembles being a consumer (Verstraete 1996: 50). New volunteers prefer loose networks offering occasional 'pick and choose' commitments. Moreover, they demand a decentralised, horizontal organisational structure rather than a rigidly bureaucratic hierarchy....
Relationship with the beneficiary
Classic volunteers devote themselves to a community, a group or a person in the name of the core ideology of the organisation. Classic volunteering is often embedded in a religious tradition of altruism. A purely self-sacrificing model of volunteering prevails. The relationship with the beneficiary is one way: the volunteers do not expect anything in return for their efforts.
New volunteers combine solidarity with a personal search for fulfillment and identity....New volunteering is a matter of giving and receiving. The relationship between New volunteers and beneficiaries is reciprocal. This shift requires us to rethink the traditional polarity of egotism and altruism in terms of a continuum. Volunteers are not born altruists; they can adopt any position on the continuum between pure altruism and pure egotism.
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