Tag Archives: black lives matter

More: systemic racism in volunteer engagement

graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

Earlier this month, I wrote a blog about systemic exclusion, including systemic racism, in volunteer management – in how we recruit volunteers, in how we screen volunteers, even in virtual volunteering. It’s been my most popular blog this year, and my most re-posted & retweeted by others – thank you to all who read and shared and commented (so far, comments have been on LinkedIn and Twitter, rather than on the blog itself).

There’s another place that systemic racism shows up in volunteer engagement, and it is something that’s been discussed for a few years now. It’s the practice of the White Savior. The term white savior, sometimes called white savior complex, refers to a belief and practice, conscious or not, that it takes white people to provide effective help to non-white people, and in the practice of volunteerism, it’s usually most common in the practice of white people from North America, Europe and Australia feeling that they are needed in Africa to dig wells, build schools and playgrounds, “care” for “orphans” for a few weeks, etc. That is a form of white supremacy, even if the volunteers themselves would never identify as racist and may even be vocal advocates against racism, as a concept or practice. Much of what is called voluntourism is rooted in white supremacy.

But this is not just a characteristic of voluntourism – paying to go abroad and “volunteer” for a few weeks, or international programs like Feed My Starving Children, which ship food to people in developing countries, rather than buying food from local sources in those countries, which both feeds far more local people than food donations every could and gives much-needed jobs to local people – also rooted in white supremacy (and vanity volunteering, for that matter). White supremacy can also be found in some volunteering within the USA (and no doubt other countries as well).

Again, I want to emphasize that this isn’t to imply that white volunteers are racists. But I do emphasize that volunteers can participate in systems that have roots in white supremacy without knowing it, even in their own communities.

One of the few academic articles I’ve seen looking at this is However Kindly Intentioned: Structural Racism and Volunteer CASA Programs, published in March 2017 and written by Amy Mulzer, a Staff Attorney and Clinical Instructor of Law in the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic, Brooklyn Law School, and Tara Urs, an Attorney for The Defender Association Division of the King County Department of Public Defense. CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates: volunteer guardians appointed by the family court to represent the “best interests” of children who enter the child welfare system. The paper looks at the impact of the race and privilege of these volunteer child advocates on child welfare decision-making. “There is reason to question the power that CASAs have been given to influence the course of children’s lives, and even more reason to question the unhesitating acceptance of this state of affairs by the majority of those working within the system. Why does the legal system assume that a group of volunteers — mostly middle-class white women — will make better decisions for a low-income child of color than her own family, community, or the child herself could make? What is it about CASAs that makes them not only acceptable, but practically untouchable? However kindly intentioned their work may be, this paper posits that CASAs essentially give voice to white supremacy — the same white supremacy that permeates the system as a whole and that allows us to so easily accept the idea that children in the child welfare system actually require the ‘gift’ of a CASA, and do not already have an abundance of ‘important people’ in their lives.”

Here’s an example of white supremacy in volunteer engagement from my own observation: a director of community engagement at a university told me that one of the most popular volunteer events among her mostly white students was when they traveled to a distant reservation for a tribal group every year and split wood for a few days for elderly members for the upcoming winter. I asked if the volunteers worked alongside young people from the tribe. The answer was no. I asked if this task was something the tribe had contacted the university about, saying that they needed people from outside their reservation to do this labor. She never gave a clear answer, just that the students were addressing a need and how “transformed” the students felt by their activities. By the time she was done telling me about the program, how much her students enjoyed it, how it “taught them about poverty,” how the volunteers were “changed” by the experience, all I could think was: this program reinforces the image for these students of helpless native Americans and does little to educate these young people about this culture and their history.

I have heard people who volunteer to serve food to people who are homeless or who are otherwise food insecure, or Habitat Humanity, balk that recipients of service they encountered, often black Americans, are not passive and grateful for their service, that they aren’t effusive in their appreciation. They also express surprise that the recipients of service didn’t “look poor.”

Please note: the voices of those purportedly helped are almost entirely absent on the web sites of many USA nonprofits, not just websites of companies that arrange voluntourism trips abroad. And also note there is a predominance of white people in the ranks of senior staff of nonprofits in the USA, even if their focus is on communities dominated by other cultures and ethnicities.

Consider these observations by Andrew Fisher, who co-founded and led the Community Food Security Coalition, in this 2017 article, “Food banks feed people. Why don’t they fight hunger?“:

While many food banks dedicate some portion of their resources to advocating for federal nutrition programs and tax credits for corporate food donations, only a handful actually take a position on wages, housing, or health care—the policies that can most effectively alleviate hunger by attacking its root cause: poverty. In the food bank community, support for these issues remains controversial, with many preferring (not) to step out of their comfort zone of delivering free food…

One Washington state food bank employee expressed the disconnect between her organization’s white board and its primarily immigrant clientele as the primary factor in reinforcing her food bank’s contribution to structural racism.

There is a frequent but unspoken conflict between the important work nonprofits do, and that volunteers help them do, and the oppressive power dynamics these nonprofits and volunteers can help to maintain, however unintentionally on their part. It’s similar to my diatribes against vanity volunteering: we assume that because the volunteers “have good hearts” and “just want to help”, whatever it is they want to do is automatically good. As I said earlier, I’m sure many of these volunteers would be horrified at the implication that they are participating in the perpetuation of white supremacy. And perhaps I’m going to get some outraged comments on this blog that its horrifying I would imply such. Then I’ll have to start talking about white fragility — a term that commonly refers to the avoidance of difficult racial conversations in order to prevent white discomfort.

Criticizing good intentions of volunteering or activism can discourage people from volunteering and trying to do good in the world. So I have to qualify these observations with saying I want volunteering to continue, I want volunteers to continue to learn about cultures and people different from their own through their service, and I think volunteer engagement can build cultural understanding and community cohesion. But none of that is true if volunteer engagement reinforces white supremacy and colonial power structures.

I think many volunteers are ready for these conversations. Consider that I shared the summary of the critical analysis of Court Appointed Special Advocates on the Reddit community to discuss CASA, and the responses from volunteers weren’t defensive but, rather, were self-reflective and self-challenging.

I’ll repeat myself from another blog: I’m on an ongoing journey to look for ways I exclude without intending to, in my consulting, in my volunteer engagement, in my communications strategies, in my language, and on and on. I’m now adding in how I volunteer to the mix. And, again, I would like for you to do so as well.

Also see:

My previous blog about systemic exclusion, including systemic racism, in volunteer management

Teaching youth about poverty – teaching compassion or supremacy?

A review of a book by a colleague and notes about its own problematic views on race.

Recognizing Racism in Volunteer Engagement – blog from Lisa Joyslin, Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration

Recruiting Local Volunteers To Increase Diversity Among the Ranks

Make All Volunteering as Accessible as Possible
Tips for creating an accommodating and welcoming environment for volunteers with disabilities.

Volunteering & social cohesion in a post Brexit world

social cohesionOn 15 September, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) National Volunteering Forum met in Manchester, England to talk about the potential implications of Brexit for volunteering, and to discuss evidence and real life examples demonstrating the role that volunteering can play in improving social cohesion. The slides from the event are shared online, and the associated tweets, here.

The tweets are SO worth reading, a mix of comments said at the forum and comments from people following online. GREAT questions and comments that will give you pause, because you shouldn’t think of obstacles to social cohesion as just a British phenomena: all over Europe, as well as the USA, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Mexico, and on and on, societies are struggling with divided socio-political landscapes. Emotions are running high, driving nationalist movements and, often, racist and xenophobia movements as well. In many places, neighbors aren’t talking to neighbors because of differences in politics, religion, language, values and more.

As I note in my paper “Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU: Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion” for the European Commission in 2014, researchers for vInspired, in exploring the contribution of volunteering to employability for young people, found that volunteering contributed to young people’s feeling of social inclusion:

  • Volunteering helped young people to develop their networks and mix with a more diverse social group. It also increased their ability to work within and across authority structures. This suggests that providing volunteering opportunities to a wide range of young people will help to break-down social barriers and lead to greater community cohesion and personal well- being.
  • The positive contribution made by young people to the organisations and communities with which they were involved, helped to overcome the negative stereotypes often applied to them, and improved perceptions of young people amongst adults such as staff, volunteers and service users.
  • Many young people are currently in a precarious economic position with the high level of youth unemployment, and some commentators are warning of a lost generation. Helping young people to stay connected to society and their communities, to develop leadership and employability skills that will shape their future, is one of the most urgent and critical tasks of the next decade.

As I note in that paper, this and other research demonstrates that volunteering can play a crucial role in building the personal resilience and capabilities that young people need to prosper in the work place and in society in general.

However, garnering those benefits from volunteering, as well as using it to encourage social cohesion, multi-cultural understanding, reconciliation, etc., is a tall order giving the current landscape in many countries:

  • War and dire economic circumstances are driving immigration at a historic rate, with desperate people seeking to migrate to more peaceful, prosperous countries, straining resources and emotions of those living in areas immigrants want to travel through or to.
  • Different ethnic, socio-economic and religious groups, among others, are clashing over everything from perceived threats to their culture and values to police relations to access to jobs to perceptions of crime rates and quality of life compared to the past.
  • Certain people are being excluded from participating fully in the societies where they reside, or from receiving the same employment, educational, societal and other benefits others in that society may receive. These people feel they are marginalized, that they have limited access to decision-making bodies, various institutions and employment.
  • Some people’s religious and ethical values clash with public social and working life, where others that have different ethical values also socialize and work. Not everyone embraces ideas of free expression, equality for all humans in all aspects of life (employment, education, marriage, etc.), democracy, non-traditional roles for women, and the value of diversity and inclusiveness. When these people are living in a society that insists on these values, by practice and laws, hostilities can arise, with ideas of tolerance and multicultural understanding clashing with deeply held beliefs and legal practices regarding human rights.
  • Change is rampant and is frightening to many people, particularly when economic situations are fragile, or perceived as such. People are hearing different languages than the one they have grown up with, they are seeing people dressing in a way that’s different than what they believe should be the cultural norm, and technology is rapidly changing employment, education and how services are delivered. The popularity of a restaurant serving food that isn’t perceived as indigenous or is perceived as being from a country local people don’t like, a poster in a church that isn’t in the official or unofficial national language,  a woman not wearing what local people believe she should be wearing – all of these acts can be perceived by a community as a threat to their local culture and values, and lead to hostilities.

The result of all of this is people feeling more and more powerless over the decisions and forces that affect their day to day lives. Fear and uncertainty is sweeping many communities, misinformation is rampant, and everything in the environment feels politicized. Many communities are becoming more segregated, with people choosing to live and socialize with people they perceive as like them in terms of culture and values, and choosing to stay away from festivals, neighborhoods, even restaurants where they believe a different culture prevails.

Can volunteering help bridge divides, increase understanding, reduce hostilities and nurture respect and social cohesion? Certainly there are organizations and researchers that think so:

What’s lacking is research showing that these efforts have, indeed, lead to multi-cultural understanding, a lessening of hostilities, etc. 

In my paper about Internet-mediated volunteering in EU countries, I identified challenges to promoting online volunteering as a pathway to social inclusion, and I believe it is, in fact, the biggest challenge for ANY volunteering as a pathway to social inclusion: resistance to including social inclusion goals into current volunteer engagement at an organization. In other words, most managers of volunteers don’t want to make social inclusion a part of their goals for volunteer engagement. Most organizations that involve volunteers have no stated reason relating to contributing to greater social inclusion for volunteers. They may not see the benefits of adapting their volunteer engagement to contribute to such. They may not have the expertise in how to do this. And they may not have the resources needed to build their expertise to do this. Agencies may resist adapting volunteer engagement schemes to include a social inclusion element, for fear of it draining resources or focus from their primary missions which may have nothing to do with social inclusion. In short: any effort to leverage volunteering as a path to greater social cohesion has to include money to pay for training of those in charge of volunteering engagement at various agencies. Otherwise, such efforts will, every likely, be doomed to failure.

Also see:

Managers of volunteers & resistance to diversity – my blog about comments that are generated when a discussion breaks out about diversifying volunteering ranks.

This lesson plan from the University of Nebraska Extension office, “Engaging Intergenerational Volunteers“, offers practical tips on having volunteers from a variety of age groups working together, as does this how-to guide from Bridges Together.

The Victoria Volunteering Portal (Australia) offers an excellent free guide on encouraging diversity among volunteer ranks.

I also offer my own free guide on Recruiting Local Volunteers To Increase Diversity Among the Ranks.