Tag Archives: unemployment

Virtual Volunteering & Employability

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Back in 2012 and 2013, I was part of the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, focused on the countries of the European Union and funded by the European Commission. The overall project aimed to inform policy regarding “new forms of work” and pathways to employability that involved online technologies. The overall ICT4EMPL project produced a series of reports on the state of play of novel forms of internet-mediated work activity: crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, and internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency) and, of course, internet-mediated volunteering (virtual volunteering).

For this project, I got to research and map the prevalence of virtual volunteering in Europe and explore how virtual volunteering could support people’s employability: Here my complete final paper. And here is the Wiki I created for the project.

Included in this paper was Chapter 4, Internet-mediated volunteering and employability. I’ve reproduced the text from Chapter 4 on the web so that it’s more findable.

Traditional volunteering – onsite, face-to-face – has been a good source for people to acquire or enhance new skills, explore careers and network with others all towards improving their employability. As the paper notes, along with enhancing technical skills and subject knowledge, employers also want other skills, many of which can be acquired through virtual volunteering:

  • Communication and interpersonal skills,
  • Problem-solving skills,
  • Using your initiative and being self-motivated,
  • Working under pressure and to deadlines,
  • Organizational skills,
  • Team working,
  • Ability to learn and adapt,
  • Numeracy,
  • Valuing diversity and difference

This chapter of my paper looks at how virtual volunteering can help to enhance those skills, as well as challenges and risk in promoting online volunteering as a route to employability.

If your agency or organization is considering virtual volunteering as a path to helping people become more employable, check out the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement. The book can help you fully explore the reality of remote volunteer engagement and what you and partner organizations will need to put in place, in terms of policy and procedures, to ensure success. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

the growing youth & loneliness crisis (& lack of empathy crisis) – could volunteer engagement help?

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The results of a nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna released last year said that nearly 50 percent of respondents in the USA felt alone or left out always or sometimes. Two in Five felt like “they lack companionship,” that their “relationships aren’t meaningful” and that they “are isolated from others.” And the loneliest demographic among respondents was young people: members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had the highest loneliness score, followed by Millennials. Yesterday, CBS Sunday Morning did segment that mentions this Cigna study and on the growing loneliness epidemic in the USA.

And then there is this report: significantly large numbers regarding unemployment among young people worldwide: in 2017, it was reported by CNN Money that youth unemployment in the eurozone has been stuck between 19% to 25% for the past eight years. In Spain and Greece, it’s north of 40%. The number of people in Italy aged between 15-29 years that are not in education, employment or training rose by 21 percent from 2008 to 2012, to 23.9 percent, and that number hasn’t improved seven years later. In Arab states, youth unemployment is around 30%. The incidence of unemployment among youth in Northern Africa was at 29.3% in 2016, representing the second highest rate across all regions.

Economists and government officials focus on the cost of unemployment to the economy as a whole, but for the unemployed, it’s a personal issue. Young people need jobs for the obvious reason: they need income to give them employment to pay for what they need to survive, day-to-day. But studies have shown that prolonged unemployment harms the mental health of workers and can actually worsen physical health and shorten lifespans as well. Prolonged unemployment can lead to an erosion of skills and, more worryingly, lead to pessimism, resentment and anger. Those negative feelings can be targeted at anyone that an unemployed person blames for their situation – people not from the area, people who are perceived as not at risk for unemployment, people perceived as taking the jobs the unemployed want, government officials, institutions, and anyone who is perceived as different.

While promoting volunteer engagement does nothing to address the immediate financial needs of the unemployed, volunteering can help a person with skills development for a career change and eventual employment. Could volunteer engagement also address other issues, like disconnection from society, resentment and anger for certain groups of people, like immigrants or ethnic minorities, and growing distrust in institutions? Can volunteering can give a person a connection to other people and to society as a whole, help increase their awareness about people and cultures different from their own and help build or restore trust in people and institutions? I think so, though there’s little data that directly supports my position.

When an organization involves volunteers, it gives non-staff a first hand, in-person experience with programs that are trying to improve the community or the environment – anything from promoting the arts to helping children’s education to accommodating dogs and cats that have been found or surrendered. This volunteer engagement can help build trust in organizations, in institutions, in the community and among people. It can give a volunteer a sense of value and influence. Volunteer engagement can play a vital role in building social cohesion and intercultural understanding, bringing together different segments of a population in a setting that can help build relationships and community. Volunteer management is community engagement and, as such, I believe volunteer engagement can help to address youth unemployment, cultural conflicts, intergenerational misunderstandings, integration, community cohesion, social integration, and on and on.

However, I’m not at all calling for business and government to start yet another Get-Out-And-Volunteer campaign. Please, don’t do that. Rather, this is a call for business and government to realize that, if they expect nonprofits, NGOs, charities and other organizations to involve more young people as volunteers, they need to provide the funding for that to happen.

Volunteers are not free. I just don’t know how many times I’m going to have to say that for it to finally be understood. For organizations to involve volunteers effectively, to involve more volunteers and to create opportunities for volunteers that go beyond just getting work done but also to build civic engagement and greater trust in the community, these volunteer-involving organizations must have the expertise to do it – which may come from training (which isn’t free) or hiring staff (also not cost-free) – and they may need additional resources to support additional volunteers, such as software or physical spaces.

Are corporations, governments, foundations and individual donors ready to step up and fund what’s needed to increase volunteer engagement, especially among young people?

April 16, 2019 update: Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.” According to this NPR article, Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University, collected decades of studies and noticed that, starting around 2000, the line starts to slide and young people are becoming less empathetic: more students were saying it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than the previous generation. Again: could volunteer engagement help? Could exposing young people to those different from themselves help? And are corporations, governments, foundations and individual donors ready to step up and fund what’s needed to increase volunteer engagement, especially among young people?

July 16, 2019 update: US Teen and the number of suicide deaths among young people began climbing around 2008 and reached a new high in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide rates lately have been increasing in all age groups in America, in almost every state. The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37 percentw between 2005 and 2014. And suicide attempts are on the rise as well.

Also see:

Welcoming immigrants as volunteers at your organization

“Internet-mediated volunteering – the impact for Europe“, part of the ICT4EMPL Future Work project. This 2013 study on virtual volunteering in European countries includes information on volunteering as a path to employability and social inclusion, especially for young people.

Volunteering to Address Your Own Mental Health (Depression, Loneliness, Anxiety, etc.)

Deriding the monetary value of volunteer hours: my mission in life?

can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation?

Volunteer management is community engagement

hey, corporations: time to put your money where your mouth is re: nonprofits & innovation

Corporations: here’s what nonprofits really need

Requiring jobless to volunteer – reality check

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John Albers, a state lawmaker from the USA State of Georgia, wants people receiving government jobless benefits to have to put in 24 hours of community service a week (read more about the story here).

Did he talk to nonprofits and government programs that involve volunteers and ask if they could involve an influx of new volunteers, putting at least one person to work for 24 hours a week?

No.

Does he know how much staff time and resources are required for a program or agency to involve volunteers, that volunteers are never free – and, therefore, will the government be providing funding to nonprofits and other organizations in order to fund the staff time and resources to involve volunteers in such large blocks of time each week?

No.

Did he do any research on how difficult it is for people who want to volunteer to find opportunities, that people report applying for multiple assignments on web sites like VolunteerMatch, over a period of weeks , sometimes over a period of months, before they ever actually end up volunteering?

No.

I’m all for people who are unemployed looking into volunteering as a way to build their skills for employment, as a way to make contacts that might lead to employment, as a way to get some accomplishments under their belt that would look great on their résumé, and as a way to counter the negative emotional pressures of unemployment.

But finding volunteering activities is hard. VERY hard. Much of my web site has been primarily focused on the organizations that involve volunteers, but I had to create pages focused on people who want to volunteer because of the OVERWHELMING number of people that post again and again to places like YahooAnswers, people who are trying to find volunteering activities and cannot find such.

Why do I get hired again and again to do training on how to involve volunteers? Why does Susan Ellis keep writing and selling so many books on volunteer engagement? Because thousands and thousands of nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), schools, government programs and many others do not know how to involve volunteers.

So, reality check, Mr. Albers. If you want organizations to involve more volunteers – and to involve volunteers in such huge chunks of time (24 hours a week – three full work days a week!), then start looking for money to give to these organizations – they will need it to fund the time (and perhaps even the training) of a full-time manager of volunteers who will screen, train, support and supervise all these thousands of volunteers you want to send their way.