Volunteering is dead

BROADENING THE DEFINITION OF VOLUNTEERING
The term volunteering has become passé: to engage citizens
we need to promote active citizenship.

As next week is National Volunteer Week, it is important to take time and rejoice in Canada’s 6.5 million volunteers that make our communities better. It is also a week to reflect on the idea of volunteering and how more people can become involved. In this vein, I would like to propose a bold statement: volunteering is dead.

This statement may cause some people to be upset, others defensive, but before you put down the paper exclaiming, “rubbish!” hear me out. In its place, I propose that active citizen engagement is more effective. Now you might put down your cereal spoon and cry, “semantics!” However, the difference between volunteering and active citizen engagement is small - but very real. Volunteering refers to a structured donation of time, whereas active citizen engagement is a spontaneous, organic method of participation.

Communities must let go of the notion that only contributions made through structured methods of volunteering count. Ad hoc community action can often be, more powerful. For example, when asked if she volunteers, the women who helps her elderly neighbour by mowing her lawn and taking her grocery shopping, would probably answer no, even though her action is very imperative to societal well-being. Does this woman care less because she doesn’t formerly volunteer?

The danger with the mindset that, acts of kindness need to take place in a prearranged way, is that it may discourage people from contributing by discounting the spontaneous donation of time, and making it seem trivial. In reality, acts of participating in a community through joining sports teams, attending social events, taking an interest in the arts, donating to bottle drives and interacting with your neighbours are all ways that help grow neighbourhoods and extend citizens’ roots deep into the community. The more involvement there is in a community the safer and healthier it will be, as its citizens have a vested interest.

It is time for leaders in the Greater Vancouver area to promote spontaneous acts of involvement. In this era of fast-paced lives and dual-income households people will have a diminishing amount of time and energy for traditional methods of volunteering. We should not berate this but instead encourage more flexible forms of action. By expanding our conception and definition of volunteer to citizen active engagement all of us in Canada will benefit.