Is Volunteering Work or Leisure?

Is Volunteering Work or Leisure?

The field of volunteerism spends inordinate amounts of time arguing the finer points of just what is and what is not volunteering. Most readers are familiar with a range of concepts that strive to ‘define’ volunteering. Such concepts include volunteering being conducted

  • without coercion,
  • without monetary reward, and
  • for the benefit of the community.

However, a much more fundamental question was posed recently on both the OzVPM (Australasia) and UKVPMs (United Kingdom) newsgroups, causing quite a reaction, and prompting us to share the thoughts of respondents with you all through this Keyboard Roundtable forum.

The question was, quite simply: ‘Is volunteering work or leisure?’

With the generous permission of the participants, we have compiled some of the key postings in this debate and hope e-Volunteerism readers will join in.

To read the full article

Mon, 05/12/2003
Asking people to define volunteering, as leisure, work, or something else I have found from my research on the matter to be a dead-end. In general volunteers and supervisors of volunteers are little interested in such cerebral questions. In the end, then, the definition of volunteering, and its leisure or work character, is for the social scientists to figure out, to be sure in close research collaboration with the volunteers themselves. The payoff of finding a valid definition is, however, enormous. If we know with reasonable precision what a volunteer is, we will know how to effectively recruit them, retain them, and advise them as to volunteer opportunities of their liking. In short, a good idea (concept), one that is empirically and theoretically valid, is worth its practical weight in gold.

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