Why did people volunteer during Covid-19?
The International Public Policy Observatory at UCL has just undertaken a systematic review of volunteering during the Covid-19 pandemic. You can find a summary of the review here.
I don’t think there will be anything in here that surprises people who are involved in engaging or leading volunteers. That’s a good thing in my book. It’s also good to have high-quality, peer-reviewed evidence that highlights the importance of the following:
- creating clearly identifiable volunteering roles from which people can gain experience;
- the importance of providing support for volunteers, including emotional support ;
- enabling organisations that can adapt to new needs (and create volunteering opportunities to deliver these);
- supporting coordination between agencies in the volunteering ecosystem;
- encouraging altruism and trust more generally.
So far, so good. Amid some irrational exuberance about what this means for volunteering post-covid, questions for policy have focused on what can be done post-covid to build on the flowering of mutual aid and volunteering.
But this might be easier said than done: there’s a long and painful history of government interventions to increase levels of volunteering (The Experience Corps, anyone?). Shifts in behaviours and attitudes suggest the ways in which people want to get involved don’t match many of the opportunities on offer. And covid response aside, there is, at best, a secular stagnation in volunteering rates.
Volunteering policy, post-covid
The future policy playbook doesn’t contain any surprises if a short review of the volunteering policy landscape is right (Disclosure: I helped write this). The themes that policymakers should consider are:
- Leadership and development of volunteering strategy, exemplified by Scotland’s national volunteering outcomes framework
- Thinking differently about volunteering: support policies that enable inclusive, flexible opportunities, such as time off work or access to volunteering funds
- Strengthening support and infrastructure for volunteering, including better support for local volunteering infrastructure and support for volunteer management within organisations (hey, it ain’t free…)
- Recognising and celebrating the value of volunteering – creating a culture where volunteers as seen as equals, not amateurs, and finding meaningful ways to reward people
- Better coordination and dialogue between organisations in the volunteering ecosystem, especially between national and local organisations, with the latter at times marginalised. Asking how we coordinate and support volunteers is probably a better question than how we mobilise them.
There is more detail in the policy review, including examples of policies or approaches that have been tried. It seems reasonable to summarise that we know what the options are: the challenge is more testing of what works.
Conclusion: start with communities
There’s been an outpouring of papers, reviews and lessons learned from the pandemic. Many of the reflections on preparedness for the next challenge highlight the role of communities. I liked this:
Finally, and most importantly, communities should be actively engaged in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. A crucial lesson from the EVD crisis was the power of community involvement for an effective response. A significant portion of the flattening of the EVD epidemic curve was attributed to crucial behavioral changes at the community level rather than international efforts such as those of the United Nations… In the same vein, the spread of COVID-19 could also be slowed and eventually halted through interventions that empower community leaders and members to be at the forefront of contact tracing, quarantine and social distancing, and educational campaigns. Not only would community engagement help to stop the pandemic, but it could also prevent social resistance and retaliation, which can hamper mitigation efforts and further worsen the scale of the pandemic.
Bhandari et al (2022) COVID-19 requires collective, decentralized, and community-led responses. International Journal of Community Wellbeing, 5, 679–683.