2.2 Civic engagement and volunteering

At a glance

About 40 minutes, including a 15-minute reading. By the end of this lesson you will be able to

• explain what civic engagement means and why civility, civic mindedness and trust matter

• describe who engages and why people volunteer

• use a simple typology to describe different types of volunteers

A student joins a neighborhood clean-up, signs an online petition and discusses a local problem in class. Which actions count as civic engagement? The giving discussed in Lesson 2.1 is one form of participation; here we widen the view to the habits, relationships and volunteer roles through which people act on shared concerns.

What civic engagement means

Civic engagement is social and political participation for the common good. It is political in the broad sense of concern with public affairs, without being tied to a party. It also means action, such as taking part in meetings and debates or volunteering, beyond simply holding a membership or paying dues. It takes several forms.

• Electoral, such as voting and contacting officials

• Volunteering, through organizations or informally

• Deliberative, such as public forums and class debates

• Community-based, such as neighborhood projects

• Advocacy, such as petitions, boycotts and protests

• Digital, such as campaigning on social media

• Educational, such as civic education and service learning

Civility, civic mindedness and trust

This list tells us what civic engagement can look like. The next question is what allows people who differ from one another to keep acting together.

Three qualities support civic life. Civility is a readiness to moderate one's own interests and balance them against those of others. It combines respect for others, a neutral and trusting attitude toward strangers, and self-restraint for the common good. Civic mindedness, in Thomas Ehrlich's words, means seeing yourself as part of a larger social fabric and treating social problems as at least partly your own. People learn it in families and schools.

Trust is the third. Robert Putnam found that regions of northern Italy with dense networks of associations had better government and stronger economies, because repeated encounters in associations built trust that people extended to strangers and institutions. A study of Japan found that trust in institutions predicted charitable giving more strongly than formal volunteering, while membership in organizations was linked to both, and more strongly to volunteering (Taniguchi and Marshall, 2014).

Who engages?

These civic qualities are learned and practiced under unequal conditions. Opportunities to discuss public issues, join organizations and volunteer are not distributed evenly.

Studies in the United States and the United Kingdom find that people with more education and middle-class incomes take part more. High income inequality may dampen engagement overall. Families and schools matter too. In a large US study, young people who grew up with political discussion at home were far more likely to volunteer, and those who had debated issues in class were more likely to follow the news, join organizations and sign petitions (Keeter et al., 2002).

Figure. In a large United States study published in 2002, civic discussion at home and classroom debate were associated with several forms of participation. The findings show an association in that setting, not a universal causal rule.

Why people volunteer

The evidence above helps explain who gets opportunities to participate. We can now look more closely at why a person chooses one of the most visible forms of civic engagement: volunteering.

Volunteering is work without pay or legal obligation, done for people outside one's own household. Most volunteers have mixed motives. Ram Cnaan and colleagues suggest judging how altruistic an act is by its net cost to the volunteer, looking at how freely it was chosen, whether any pay is involved, how formal it is and who benefits. An executive who gives up her evenings to help a charity bears a high net cost. A student who volunteers to meet a graduation requirement bears a low one.

Motives fall into three broad groups. Altruistic motives include compassion and solidarity with people in need. Instrumental motives include gaining skills and experience, meeting people and having something worthwhile to do. Obligation motives include moral or religious duty and repaying a debt to the community. Clary and colleagues (1998) list six functions volunteering can serve, namely expressing values, gaining understanding, building social ties, advancing a career, protecting oneself from life's difficulties and personal growth.

Types of volunteers

Figure. The typology compares availability with assets such as expertise, experience and connections. It describes what an organization needs from a volunteer role, not the worth of the person filling it.

Motives help us understand the volunteer's perspective; organizations must also design work that people with different time and assets can actually do. Lucas Meijs and Jeffrey Brudney use the four types to help managers create suitable roles. Regular service volunteers need dependable schedules and support. Specialists need bounded tasks that make good use of scarce expertise. Highly connected or experienced volunteers may contribute both time and influence. Short-term or inexperienced volunteers need clear, achievable work and supervision. A person may move between types as their skills and availability change.

Example. Volunteering after disasters in Japan

After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, so many people came to help that the year became known in Japan as the first year of volunteers. Much of this help was informal and short-term, and it led to new laws for nonprofit organizations. Lesson 4.4 returns to this story.

Read

• United Nations Volunteers. (2021). Volunteerism. Building equal and inclusive societies. In 2022 State of the world's volunteerism report (Chapter 1, pp. 13-28). UNV. https://knowledge.unv.org/system/files/2021-12/Chapter%201_web.pdf

The chapter is free to read. Note the five categories of volunteering it describes, namely mutual aid, service, campaigning, participation and leisure, and decide which are most common where you live.

Go further. Keeter, S., Zukin, C., Andolina, M., & Jenkins, K. (2002). The civic and political health of the nation. A generational portrait. CIRCLE. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED498892.pdf

Try it

Read each case from both sides of the relationship. Which type of role has the organization created, and what motive is likely strongest for the volunteer? Then open the answers.

1. A retired accountant reviews a small NGO's accounts for one week each year.

2. A university student helps at a food bank for a month to gain experience for job applications.

3. A neighbor packs and delivers meals every Tuesday, and has done so for years.

4. A well-known lawyer chairs an NGO's board and introduces its staff to senior officials.

Key takeaway

Civic engagement includes many ways of acting on shared concerns, from discussion and advocacy to sustained service. Participation grows through values, trust and learned habits, while effective volunteer programs match people's mixed motives and varied resources with work they can meaningfully perform.