You Shall (Not) Pass

Volunteering appears to be a mechanism that can contribute to societal inclusion. As nonprofit organizations continuously seek more volunteers, opportunities for volunteer inclusion seem limitless. We argue that, in reality, it is not that simple. Volunteer exclusion derives from the failure to seek, recruit, and place potential volunteers with antecedents predicting non-volunteering. This article focuses on the “sending-organization” in dual volunteer management. We look at sending-organizations, such as a corporation or school, that organizes volunteer opportunities for its participants in a “receiving-organization,” i.e., the organization where the volunteer service is performed. Based on qualitative data generated from semi-structured and vignette interviews, we explore the crucial role that gatekeepers at the sending-organization play in the inclusion and exclusion of volunteers in receiving-organizations. We identify three strategies for these sending-gatekeepers to enhance volunteer inclusion: encouraging, enabling, and enforcing.</p

The role of religiosity for formal and informal volunteering in the Netherlands

Contains fulltext : 99781.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)This paper deals with the question: To what extent do individual religious characteristics, in addition to collective religious characteristics, contribute to the explanation of formal and informal volunteering in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 21st century? To answer this research question, we used the SOCON 2005-2006 dataset. Our main finding concerns informal volunteering: we found that spirituality increases the likelihood of informal volunteering, implying that openness to other people's needs increases the likelihood of the actual provision of help. There are no other aspects of religiosity that are related to informal volunteering. With regard to formal volunteering we found that, in line with previous research, religious attendance is related positively to formal volunteering, religious as well as secular volunteering, which can be regarded as support for the proposition that religious involvement is important for norm conformity. Further, having a more religious worldview decreases the likelihood of formal volunteering which might show that those with a strong religious worldview are more concerned with the 'otherworldly' and less so with what they do in this world. We found no influence of individual religious characteristics on formal volunteering. These results confirm the idea that integration into a religious community plays quite a large role in explaining formal volunteering. Informal volunteering, however, seems to be independent of social networks: it rather depends on individual motivation.25 p