Helping others
As part of Volunteers' Week, a look at what motivates volunteers and helps them to continue volunteering.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
The quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead is often used in relation to volunteers, who willingly undertake unpaid work to support others or their local community. The week of the 3rd June is a national celebration of volunteering in the UK throughVolunteers’ Week, an event marking its 40th year in 2024. Coinciding with the end of that week is the Big Help Out event on the 7-9th June, which aims to promote local volunteering opportunities.
In 2023 I undertook a project with a local community group who manage woodland within the National Forest to look at the mental wellbeing benefits of being a volunteer and member of the group. The members informal feedback suggested themes relating to social and nature connection, which you can read more about on the Heartwood Woodland Community Group’s website. While it was not a formal research project and very small scale, it was nice to find those themes echoed published research on the multiple mental wellbeing benefits volunteering may provide.
Awareness and celebratory events such as Volunteers’ Week highlight the societal importance of volunteering, how it benefits communities and individuals. Data from 2022 showed that around 3% of the UK workforce are employed by voluntary organisations and that the voluntary sector contributes around 1% to the UK economy. Collectively this all suggests a vibrant volunteering spirit within the UK.
However data on volunteering levels offer a slightly different perspective. A UK government report published in 2023 also based on 2021/2 data indicates that around 27% (12 million) of people in England perform a formal volunteering role at least once a year, while 16% (7 million) volunteered at least once a month. While that sounds positive, the Community Life Survey report highlights that volunteering levels in England have been steadily dropping since the data was first captured in 2013/4, as the graph below shows, with those regularly volunteering down from 27% and those volunteering at least once a year down from 45%. There was a slight reverse in the trend during 2019/20, which was followed by a sharper decline as volunteering levels were adversely impacted by health concerns and public health measures regarding the covid pandemic.
The 2021/22 report goes on to consider the motivations and barriers to volunteering. Amongst the top reasons for taking part were the desire to help within the local community, feeling personally driven by an issue that was felt to be important, and to connect with other people. The key barriers included work or childcare commitments, along with having other things to do with free time. Interestingly the 4th highest barrier, provided by 15% of respondents, related to not having thought about volunteering. Broadly these key motivations and barriers have been constantly reported across the annual Community Life Surveys.
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Recent psychological studies have explored further the motivations and barriers to volunteering, including those involved in nature-based work and in emotionally demanding roles.
Looking after trees
A 2023 paper from Alex Elton and a US based research team documents a review of published literature relating to volunteers who help maintain urban forests, a term relating to all trees within an urban setting, both privately and publicly owned. In the US volunteers make up around 5% of the workforce who help to maintain trees planted in community and public spaces. The review includes both published articles and “grey literature”, which means other publications outside of formal academic journals, with the authors identifying several themes from the review.
Under motivating factors, the review highlights volunteers felt connected to the trees and wanted to help improve their local community by tending them, which was coupled with their sense of making a positive difference. Forming social connections within the local community, along with learning new skills and knowledge were also important motivations, followed by the volunteering providing a form of physical exercise. The benefits included mental wellbeing, such as helping to reduce stress, greater social cohesion across different community groups and formations of deeper attachments to local places. Volunteering to support the trees also helped to raise awareness of nature within the urban settings and enabled a number of citizen science projects to take place, providing volunteers with further opportunities to learn new skills and knowledge. The review findings suggested that recruitment of new volunteers was best supported by word of mouth and via contact with existing volunteers. Environmental concern was an important factor in joining in, while social connection and personal motivations appeared to be stronger influences on continuing to take part. Feeling supported while volunteering and feeling proud of the work were also key factors to the retention of volunteers.
The key barriers to volunteering included a lack of time, a fear of not having the right skills or knowledge to contribute, and a lack of awareness of the need to maintain the trees. Within the specific context of urban forests the review highlighted that some communities were resistant to introduction of trees into some public spaces due to concerns of the ongoing maintenance by volunteers.
The review is limited in terms of generalisation by its focus on a specific nature-based volunteering activity within the US and the inclusion of non-peer reviewed literature. That said the findings are supportive of the findings of the UK government report with regard to motivations and barriers.
Keep on going
Wessel Ganzevoort and Riyan van den Born’s 2023 paper also focused on motivations and barriers although this time with more focus on volunteer retention within nature-based volunteering, highlighting that most research focuses on recruitment. Their study was informed by the Self Determination Theory (SDT) developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, which considers intrinsic (internal reward) motivation and extrinsic (external reward) motivation. SDT includes three dimensions linked to overall wellbeing - autonomy (the level of control we have over what we do), competence (our skills or ability) and relatedness (social connection). The authors suggest that relatedness can also include nature connection, with previous research suggesting nature connection is a motivation to start volunteering while sense of community and social connection are motivations to continue, which echoes one of the findings from the review by Elton and colleagues.
As part of a wider study of 3775 Dutch volunteers in 2017, the study reviewed responses from around 2000 of those participants to four open questions around volunteering. The analysis suggests that gaining pleasure from volunteering was the top reason to continue for nearly a quarter of the participants, with working with others and working in nature the next highest motivating factors. Key negative factors resulted from either social conflicts, from within the volunteering groups and with related third parties, or increasing workloads and demands due to shortage of volunteers. The participants were also asked to provide reasons they would have for stopping volunteering and why they thought others had stopped. The results were similar across both questions, with age or health concerns accounting for over a third of explanations for leaving, followed by lack of time and work commitments. The total of issues relating to social conflict explained around 15% of reasons to leave.
Applying SDT to the responses, the authors highlight that supporting volunteers to do things they enjoy and want to do clearly links to their sense of autonomy, while supporting them to learn new skills and knowledge fosters competency. Notably the relatedness dimension had a positive element, through social connection and a negative aspect, through social conflict. The results are limited by the subjective interpretation of participants responses and the data does not capture information about their volunteering experience, such as duration or type of organisation they volunteer through. Despite that, the key themes again align with the Community Life Survey and the literature review findings. I thought it interesting that while the analysis highlighted social connection had positive and negative aspects, nature connection was only reported as having a positive influence on volunteering.
Compassionate action
Volunteering can be a demanding role and this is perhaps especially true for volunteers who support crisis and support line services. Alanna Donnellan and colleagues from the University of Limerick 2023 paper considered the emotional impact on volunteers of text-based support services. Research has suggested that volunteers in such roles may face an increased risk of psychological distress and burnout as a result of information disclosed, the abuse they may face at times, and also not knowing what an outcome might be for someone who contacts them. The authors suggest that text-based support, via text messages or online chats, may exacerbate the distress, leading to reduction in compassion satisfaction (positive emotions associated to helping) and increased compassion fatigue (decreased motivation to care).
The study was carried out in 2022 with 157 volunteers at two crisis line organisations who respond to text-based messages. They were asked about their volunteering, how they saw themselves as volunteers and the support they received, along with a quality of life measure which specifically looked at compassion satisfaction and fatigue.
The results showed that it was a sample with high levels of compassion satisfaction and low levels of fatigue. The participants sense of identification as a volunteer and identification with the organisation were positively linked to levels of satisfaction and negatively linked to compassion fatigue. The analysis model showed that the more volunteers identified with their role and organisation, the more likely they were to report feeling supported, which in turn fostered a greater sense of self-efficacy. This appeared to increase compassion satisfaction while acting as a buffer to compassion fatigue. It is a cross-sectional study, so causal relationships cannot be identified and the participants opted to take part, which may mean the sample suffers from a self-selection bias towards those with greater levels of compassion satisfaction from volunteering. However it does underline the important influence of how volunteers see themselves with regard to their role and the organisation or group they volunteer within, as well as underlining the need for appropriate support of volunteers.
Volunteering can provide many benefits to both the volunteers and to the people, communities and places their work supports. Research indicates that social factors and support are important influences to volunteering, especially with regard to retention. While research can present some generalisation around motivations and barriers, the reason why each and every volunteer takes part is often personal and results from a combination of factors.
Addressing the common barriers appears a key concern given the reducing number of volunteers highlighted within the Community Life Survey. It can be hard to find time to volunteer or find local opportunities that are available outside of work or caring commitments. It also seems a large number of people have not really thought about it. Perhaps this is why events such as Volunteers’ Week and the Big Help Out are important, not just to raise awareness of volunteering but to highlight local opportunities that may allow more people to take part.
On a personal note several elements of the research resonate with my own experience of volunteering in various contexts, from rugby coaching to road safety, as well as environmental education and conservation groups. The motivations for being involved in each context have perhaps been different, although the key personal benefits are probably similar.
Let’s celebrate the many benefits of volunteering and those who are able to take part. Perhaps you may feel inspired to find a local opportunity - not only are you helping others, you may find it helps you too.
Thanks ever so much for reading this article. All the research reviewed are open access studies, so are freely available to read in detail via the links in the article or from the references below. If you think the article would be helpful to someone else please do share on, it is a freely available public post.
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References - all open access
Donnellan, A., Bradshaw, D., & McMahon, J. (2024). Social support and self‐efficacy serially mediate the association of strength of identification with text‐based crisis support line volunteers' compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 34(1), e2735. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2735
Elton, A. J., Harper, R. W., Bullard, L. F., Griffith, E. E., & Weil, B. S. (2023). Volunteer engagement in urban forestry in the United States: reviewing the literature. Arboricultural Journal, 45(2), 96-117.https://doi.org/10.1080/03071375.2022.2030620
Ganzevoort, W., & van den Born, R. J. (2023). The everyday reality of nature volunteering: an empirical exploration of reasons to stay and reasons to quit. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2023.2240953